Project Details

Budget

Item/Material	Date Purchased	Cost
Gas	1/16/2018	$35.11
Lunches	Daily Jan 15 - Feb 15	$3 * 24 = $72
TOTAL COST		$107.11

 Goals

Goal 1:

●  Communicate with company leaders and members of my community

●   I was partially able to achieve this goal. Due to my position in the company, I was in constant contact with partners and managers of the firm. However, I was not able to meet with community members in person. A few short phone calls for small details made up my communication with community members.

Goal 2:

●  Strive to be a positive and hardworking addition to the HintonBurdick team

●  I was able to meet this goal. My manager and local partner both complimented me on my ability to turnover tax returns speedily and accurately. This took a lot of hard work and a positive attitude during stressful workdays.

Outcomes

Outcome 1:

By completing my communication goal, I learned faster and completed dozens of tax returns for HintonBurdick clients in one month. The benefit of this outcome is better understanding, job experience, and an ability to communicate problems and solutions.

Outcome 2:

By being a positive and hardworking employee, I made my job and the overall work environment more enjoyable. Through this, I also earned trust and built my career network with notable CPAs in the community.

Deliverables

Deliverables 1-3 are pay stubs showing the dates and hours worked for my project.

Deliverables 4 and 5 show the materials and cubicle I was given to prepare tax returns.

Deliverables Folder 

Key Takeaways

Lessons learned

Because I was the only intern working in the Cedar City office, I had to take initiative in scheduling times to watch trainings, and meeting with my manager to discuss questions and concerns. I feel this helped me develop as a leader through the need to be proactive, responsible, and persistent. Also, as this is a new job, there was high pressure to make a good impression. Thus, at first I did not want to ask too many questions. I felt this would make me seem incapable. However, I realized my need to learn correct procedures outweighed the need to appear as the perfect intern. I feel this learning experience specifically helped me grow as a leader because I had to humble myself and look to peers and superiors for insights and clarifications.

Overall, this project showed me that as a leader, I am dedicated and hardworking, but sometimes forget that it’s ok to mess up. I learned to be confident and trust myself and my training. And although doing taxes from my cubicle may not have changed any lives, I know this project has provided me with experiences I can use to enhance discussions with peers and classes in the future. 

Future plans

This project impacted how I will organize future projects. In preparing for this project, I did not have a great idea of the tasks I would be completing as an intern. I knew I would be doing tax returns, but I expected 30 hours of work a week, right from the start. Additionally, I hoped to work more with the public. In the future I would sit down with my project supervisor and go through more details of what I expected from the project. What I got was still a great experience, but I did not feel as prepared for those first few weeks as I wish I would have been. To be more successful in the future, I know now that I need to have a more direct and specific plan.

My other huge fault in this project was my calculation of cost. I am not sure why I originally assumed such a high cost, perhaps because I counted the worth of volunteer time. This should not have been added to cost since I was being paid a fair wage for my work. Therefore, in the future I would not be so general with my budget plan, but rather get more specific and try to determine actual costs.