My Career Day Experience For career day I had the opportunity to shadow my uncle, David Nguyen, at Realty Income. At first I was kind of worried that I wouldn't like what I would be doing for internship, but after spending a day there, I realized it wasn't going to be that bad. When I arrived, my uncle took me through a tour of the accounting department which is who I'd be doing work for the most. I met all the people who might have assignments and projects for me to do during my time at Realty Income and where my cubicle would be. I think the funniest part of the entire tour was how excited everyone was to show me the "Snack Shack" which the accounting department has kept secret from the other departments. After the tour, my uncle and I sat at his desk so he could explain what Realty Income did. Just because there are a lot of departments doing a lot of things, I'll focus mainly on what the accounting department does and the company in general.
Realty Income is a company that buys properties and sells to tenants that pay rent to them. For example, some of the property they own have different popular chains of take-out food on them. There are many different departments that take care of maintaining balances and income for properties, creating balance sheets, keeping track of the value of properties (cash, land value, property value, invoice paid, and money made), and also writing reports on the company's progress. There are 3 kinds of reports; the monthly report, the quarterly report, and the annual report. The reports are about assets, liabilities, equity (ownership), revenue, income statements, expenses, and net income. My uncle works for the accounting department within this company. A typical work day for my uncle is reviewing invoices for payment approval, review prior month issues to be resolved before next month-end closing, and review current process for improvement. The month-end closing puts everything together into one report. The report for this is called a balance sheet. It basically gets the final number for month end close and checks to make sure everything is ready for the quarterly report. The process for the month-end report is to ensure all transactions for the month have been posted to the general ledger, reconcile the general ledger to supporting documents, and prepare analysis reports to ensure the month end results are reasonable. He also meets with the accounting department team to discuss other projects like process improvements, reporting requests from other departments, etc. Work policy and dress code are what you expect in a professional environment. For tardiness, absence, and hours you're supposed to work, the rules are pretty generalized. Employees have a framework of time that is expected of them to be at work which was previously agreed on with their bosses. Every employee varies, however. Most employees work from 8 am to 5 pm, but some may work from 7 am to 4 pm or 9 am to 6 pm. Employees are expected to consistently work their set hours but, if needed, can notify their team when they have to work different hours. Any missed time should be made up and employees are expected to act professional and team others with courtesy and respect. The dress code is fairly standard for a business like Realty Income. It's basically business casual; for Realty Income, this means no jeans (except for Friday), no graphic t-shirts, and professional wear (suits, blouses, dresses, dress pants, etc). At first, I completely forgot there would be a dress code, so I had to do last minute shopping for formal dress pants because my entire wardrobe consists of jeans, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. Fortunately, I found enough clothes that I'll be able to wear throughout internship. After learning about everything the company expected of their employees and what the company does, my uncle had to step away to attend a meeting and left me at his cubicle to review the 2017 Annual Report. This has the historical background of the company, highlights of the year, and financial performance of the company. It's for the people buying Realty Income to know what they're buying and if it's worth it in the end. For a few hours I sat at the cubicle and took detailed notes on the Annual report. I was told that this was going to be something I would do if there wasn't anything else assigned to me, so I didn't want to rush into it. When my uncle got out of the meeting, he sat down with me to go over the worksheet that students needed to fill out. At this point it was already past 4 hours, so we went out to go get lunch and talk about internship some more, just to double check that the times we discussed worked. Overall I had a good time working at Realty Income and I think I'm going to be a lot more interested than I originally thought. It has a lot of stuff that I actually don't mind spending time on; this includes note taking and analyzing data. These two things are done quite a lot at High Tech. I feel like biology, English and math all prepared me well for this internship. I took very detailed notes in biology and English, and spent a lot of time analyzing things such as data or documents in general. Math class also helped me prepare for this internship because I'm going to be needing to do quick math and calculations to help write a month-end report and analyse data from previous reports. I'm very excited to start internship at Realty Income and I think I'm going to do very well there. Even if it's not what I originally wanted to do, I can always get the experience of running a business and owning property.
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