As I approached my first day at Source One Management Services, A Corcentric Company, I felt a mixture of emotions. I was excited, nervous, and anxious to finally start my first job in business analytics. The only other time I felt something like this was for my first day of high school sports. I asked myself, Will I be good enough? Am I prepared? Are they going to like me? These questions popped into my head for both sports tryouts and this internship. Doing an internship is essentially participating in a three month tryout. The company thinks you might be a good fit so they offer you an opportunity to prove yourself. Since sports and internships pretty similar, I decided to share what I learned from playing sports, and how I can implement those lessons into my job. 

My sports career was a great experience. I was able to play football and basketball all four years in high school. While I really only played sports because it was fun, I did not realize the impact it had on my life. I learned many lessons that I have been able to implement in my day-to-day life , and more specifically, my internship. Each of the points below are the most valuable lessons I learned.


Failure is not Permanent



Learning that failure does not last forever was important for me to understand. Everyone fails in sports. You can fail multiple times in a sporting event and still win the game. This lesson has helped me while being an intern. Having no prior experience in procurement, I have made plenty of mistakes as an intern. Learning from my mistakes is how I try to improve each day.

Learn to Adapt

Source One offers so many different sourcing, procurement, and consulting services. One moment I could be working on auditing and the next I shift into a spend analysis project. Being able to quickly adapt from project to project has helped me complete my work on time without sacrificing any quality.   

Hard Work Yields Results

I saw players that were filled with talent get beat out by players that outworked them. This taught me the importance of hard work and how talent is not always everything if you do not have the work ethic to go with it. Coming to work everyday ready to work hard will allow me to learn as much possible in the three months I am here. 

Now that I have hit the halfway point of my internship, I am beginning to realize how much I have learned in such a short amount of time. The life lessons I was able to take away from sports has helped prepare me for the life of an intern. The Source One team has helped me understand how the strategic sourcing process works and why they have been so successful at implementing it for the past 25+ years. I know I still have a lot to learn but I am very happy with my experience so far and excited to keep learning! 
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Daniel O'Malley

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