Often times, it feels as though in order to stand out, we – as green as we are in this industry – must over-perform to be recognized for our efforts. But after we visited Leverage Agency’s offices in midtown Manhattan, we learned that this was far from the case. Patricia Ginestiere, who serves as General Counsel for Leverage as well as the Director of Business Development, informed us that, more often than not, it is the accomplishment of smaller tasks that will ensure an organization’s trust in you. Patricia attributed this to the fact that managers won’t trust their employees to complete the larger and more prestigious tasks unless they can be trusted handling the less-significant ones. It seemed to me that what Patricia was arguing was that it’s paramount to our combined success as interns and future full-time employees to develop a reputation for ourselves as reliable and hardworking individuals.

“It is easy to feel as though we are judged for the quality of the work that we do when, in reality, we are judged more so by our willingness and enthusiasm in completing it.”

I thought more deeply about this advice and in reflecting it with the work that I myself was doing in my internship at Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. Like all other jobs, there are moments of significance – signing six-figure sponsorship contracts or closing in on exciting new prospects – but there are also a myriad of moments that seem far more trivial – spellchecking a memo or working reception, for example. But somewhere in the middle, between the slower moments and the heart-racing ones, lies the opportunity to appreciate each for its own, particularly the former. It is easy to feel as though we are judged for the quality of the work that we do when, in reality, we are judged more so by our willingness and enthusiasm in completing it. It seems clear that this is what Patricia was trying to convince us of and, so too, clear that this is how I ought to go about the ways in which I learn from and appreciate my work experience both with MSBA and any other organization in the future.