Tyler Baird, a dual-degree student at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and School for Environment and Sustainability, discusses the importance of summer coaching for first-year students. The coaching helped him reassess his values and improve communication skills with his boss by valuing small talk and feedback, ultimately enhancing his internship experience.
Transcript:
My name is Tyler Baird.
I'm a dual degree
at the Gerald R. Ford
School Public Policy
and the School for Environment
and Sustainability here at the
University of Michigan.
I think summer coaching is a
must for first year students,
especially those who
don't have a lot of
work experience before coming
into their internship.
The coaching was
designed to really help
me to assess what
my own values were
and the way that
I was interacting
with the people I was working
with during my internship.
I was explaining to my coach
that when I'm
talking to my boss,
sometimes I feel frustrated by,
you know, small talk
or things like that.
He kind of turned the situation
around and started asking me,
why do you prioritize
productivity so much?
Why does your boss
bring this sort
of small talk thing
to the table?
And we started
talking about how,
especially in In dealing
with the public,
being able to communicate and
converse like a real
person and not just be on
productivity mode
all the time is
a really valuable trait to have.
And so I started
immediately, like,
reframing these conversations
that I was having with
my boss and being like, this
is actually kind of nice.
My leadership coach was
talking about the
value of feedback,
and I learned how to ask for
that feedback in the
process of my internship,
which was something that I
didn't really do before.
I sort of thought that maybe,
oh, I'm just an intern.
If they have feedback
me, they'll tell me.
I really was able
to apply asking for
that feedback and expecting
that two way relationship.