My summer experience has been an unplanned but welcome one. With the beginning of the ongoing pandemic, my summer internship plans were shaky. I am glad to have the opportunity to learn through the Center for Innovation, Business, and Entrepreneurship (CIBE). I have been spending my summer working remotely as an Innovation Consultant for the Wabash College CIBE. Through the CIBE, I have been consulting to Archon Tech Strategies, a technology solution provider based in Carmel, IN, and was founded by Tony Unfried ’03. I spent most of my time working on CSA360, Archon Tech’s physical security software platform. Learning about the back end of CSA360 has improved my understanding of Archon Tech’s product offering and allowed me to complete my tasks at a higher standard. Although I have been working on a physical security software platform, I did not perform any software production. Still, I did practice a wide array of other skills throughout this experience.
These past seven weeks have been fantastic due to exposure to various fields such as sales, marketing, competitive research, cloud architecture, and project management. Besides gaining valuable knowledge and learning technical skills, I managed to make many new connections and meet new people from various backgrounds. As I mentioned, my tasks range over a variety of fields – such as cold calling for sales, pitch decks for marketing, primary and secondary research on competitors, and deploying Amazon Web Services resources into the cloud for CSA360. Technical skills aside, I also gained valuable experience using different business and productivity-oriented applications such as Salesforce and Atlassian’s offerings such as Bitbucket, Jira, and Confluence. Truthfully, I believe cold calling has taught me my most valuable lesson throughout this summer experience: to get over the fear of rejection or failure.
To conclude, I would like to thank the Wabash College CIBE for providing this opportunity during this strange summer as well as Archon Tech Strategies for the chance to work with them through the CIBE. I am truly grateful for this valuable experience when uncertainty is a familiar feeling in the general population.
