Hi fellow Chapman students and faculty! My name is Henry Jones, I am currently a senior at Chapman University. Being that I am a transfer student, I recently finished my second full year this Spring and have one more semester until I will graduate. I am in the School of Communication with a leadership minor. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my experience at Chapman. In my short 2 years at the University I have been able to gain valuable skills that I can carry into the workplace and life. This Summer of 2020 I pursued an internship with a company called Trojan Horse Innovations, INC (THI) as an operations manager. The company is owned by a longtime family friend, and his partner set up an internship for me at their office in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.

I obtained my Internship through networking, but not in the traditional way. I am lucky enough to know the owner of THI which allowed me to be more comfortable reaching out to him and his partner for the opportunity. They were looking to add more employees to their staff as business had really picked up during the pandemic.

For my internship, I was brought on as an operations manager. This position is in charge of a magnitude of responsibilities. Trojan Horse Innovations, INC is a global provider of network connectivity devices such as fiber optics. The company manufactures and distributes mainly optical transceivers and other brand compatible devices to a number of companies across the globe. Day to day during my internship, I was responsible for creating sales reports and invoices in QuickBooks while executing incoming orders. As THI is a manufacturer of the products we provide, I had to also learn the back end of the coding process that each part goes through. This part of the internship was intimidating as I had never had experience coding on computers before, but over the weeks of my internship I got a hold of the process fairly well.

I feel many of my communication courses I’ve taken at Chapman helped me in variety of ways with my internship. With any job, communication among coworkers or your boss is extremely important. The lower division communication classes I’ve taken like Group Communication or Intro to Communication helped me gain the necessary skills to communicate in small groups and work together with others. Every day of my internship I worked with other employees on day to day operations. It was important for us to know what each of us was doing so operations remained efficient.

I think the most valuable experiences I had was using QuickBooks and working in a small team. The accounting software program QuickBooks is a valuable tool to understand because the program is a record of a company’s transactions and breaks down inventory, invoices, customers, and bills. Getting hands on experience with QuickBooks at THI was a very valuable experience for myself. Also, working in a small team in the office put my communication skills to the test. With multiple people in the office handling a number of tasks it is crucial for the team to communicate amongst each other, so goals are being met as well as tasks being completed. I feel working in smalls groups in many different communication classes I’ve taken at Chapman pushed me to be a strong member in the office.

My advice to other students looking to get into this field or other fields is don’t be afraid to reach out to people who can help you and ask a lot of questions. From my experience, I was timid to ask questions because I didn’t want to come off as I wasn’t picking up on things. But I learned that the people I worked for live for the industry and love to explain it because they are passionate about it. I also found it very useful to double check after I asked questions. Following through with new tasks can be difficult, so continuing to check in with the people who are in charge came to be very helpful.

I am proud to say my internship with Trojan Horse Innovations, INC has led me to a full-time job offer that I have accepted. I look forward to building my career with the company.