Entry #3

Dates: 6/24/2019 -- 6/27/2019
Activities: Database Cleanup, Record Changing, Inventory, Record Updating
Technical Information: ACS, Permanent Records, Google Docs
Reflection: My classroom experiences have not really prepared me for the internship thus far. That is because we simply don't do the things that businesses do in the classroom setting. For example, I've never worked on a database in the classroom like I'm doing at my internship. There are things like soft skills that I learn in the classroom and that AOIT has brought me, such as teamwork, professional speaking, and organizational skills. I am thankful that I have been given the opportunities from AOIT to learn and grow in these areas before many high schoolers even think about it. These soft skills have been used in staff meetings, presentations, and social media posts for my internship. I wish that I had learned more about web development in my classes. I am however on the programming track, and my knowledge of programming did not help me with the tasks I've done. I wish I could've gotten more experience working on web development, because that is one of the big tasks I'm doing in this internship. But, I feel like if this internship didn't expose me to the web development side of IT, I wouldn't have been able to learn about it and become an independent worker on it. So to sum it up, I was prepared for the soft skills of this internship, but I had to learn and adapt to some web development software and ideas that were completely new to me.

Day-By-Day:
June 24th was a big database cleanup day. There were almost 600 records (people) who did not have a primary campus, and we had to look through the change log and other information to classify their primary campus. We couldn't determine the primary campus of everyone however, and compiled an email with names to send out to the rest of the church family. In the morning, Ms. Robinson also came for a site visit.
On June 25th, I sat in on a staff meeting that lasted about 2 hours. It was very interesting to compare it to the last meeting I went to, since the new executive director lead his first meeting. We also had to update some address changes that were given to me from the congregational care director. We also had a switch from one database to another a few months ago, and had to make everyone who was missing a birth year, born in 1960. So in the new database, we changed everyone back to just not having a birth year.
On June 26th, we went through the recent confirmands and updated their membership status and confirmation date, just updating records for them. Tomorrow, we are going to put these in the permanent church record book. We also ran some searches on people who were missing contact information like phone numbers or email addresses, and are going to make those into spreadsheets and organize them.
On June 27th, we went through an old computer closet and identified and did inventory on what we have. It took quite a bit of time, as we also took pictures of everything so the people using the inventory list could relate a name to a picture. Then in the afternoon, we worked with permanent church records, and this was different because it was actually hard-copy information, compared to the electronic entry I've been doing thus far. We organized all the information in a Google Doc.