No obstacles in week 3 = Definite obstacles in week 4

When I saw that the blog prompt last week was about overcoming obstacles I sat and thought, wow, I've been really lucky that my internship experience has been going smoothly so far. Last week I got to sit in on a major meeting with the VP's at one of MLH's hospitals and got to sit in on a round of interviews - things were great! This week has gotten a little more overwhelming however.

My supervisor is out on vacation this entire week, and her job is to basically do all of the behind the scenes work for the recruiters while they're out recruiting... all of which was dumped in my lap this week. Yesterday morning I got to work with a ton of emails from the recruiters asking me to do various things, some of which I knew how to do and others I didn't. Julie, my supervisor, told me that I could text her if I ever needed anything but I didn't want to interrupt her first day of vacation. Most of my Monday afternoon was spent screening candidates for a Patient Representative position. I would call them, ask then a few simple questions, and then take notes on their answers. This way the recruiters had a smaller pool of candidates to bring in for interviews and they didn't have to weed out hundreds of people on their own time. At the end of the day I scanned all of my notes, emailed them to the recruiter they were for, and then threw them out because she now had them on her computer... what did she need the hard copies for?

The complicated machine that caused my stressful morning!

Well, when I got into the office this morning, I had an email from her saying the attachment I sent was blank and that's when I realized I put all of the papers in the scanner UPSIDE DOWN so it scanned the back blank side of the page not the side with my notes, which were of course, in the trash that had been taken out at the end of the day the day before. Now panicking, I went through everyones resumes again and tried to recall what each candidate said but unfortunately I spoke to so many people it was all a blur. I sent her what I could remember without telling her what happened, and the notes were just pretty simple unlike my original detailed ones. I was really upset with myself over such a silly, technical mistake.

I felt a lot better at the end of the day however when the recruiter got back to me with two names of candidates I screened asking me to schedule them for interviews! I called them to let them know they got the interview and they were ecstatic... I made their day. While I may have ruined some other candidates chances at the job by losing my original notes and then not fully recalling what they had said before, I got to see my work turn into an interview for two really worthy and excited applicants.