My name is Luke Dalton and I will be a 4^th year student in September studying a BA in Business Information Management.  I was 10 weeks through my 12 week internship with Salaso Health Solutions when the country went into lockdown.  I was completing my internship as a data analyst.  Several meetings were held in work, creating contingency plans as it was forecasted that the country may shutdown.  On the day the office closed all equipment was put into the trunks of employee’s cars and the office door was locked for the unforeseeable future.  For the next two weeks I was working closely with the Salaso team through online communication to get tasks completed and meet deadlines.  Overall, I found the following pros and cons:

More Freedom:  Straight away I enjoyed having the freedom of working on things in my own time, I was no longer struck to the 9-5 schedule.  I could come online in the morning and participate in my daily meetings.  If I had something outside of work to do during the day, I could take a few hours off and come back to complete work in the evening time and not restricted by the office closing times.  It was also nice to be able to complete tasks during the weekend if you expected to have a busy week coming up.

Zero Travel:  A big positive I noticed was the need to not travel to work, saving on fuel costs and also helping the environment at the same time.  By not having to get earlier to drive to work it allows you to get an extra 20-30 minutes sleep which makes you more alert when starting work in my opinion.

Motivation:  One of things I noticed when I started working at home is that you need to be highly motivated.  You won’t have someone checking what your doing at your desk so there are more opportunities to slack off.  I found it was key to keep a diary of what you want to achieve in a day and follow it to keep yourself motivated.

Poor WiFi Connection:  As someone who lives in an area with a poor to average WiFi speed it can sometimes affect meetings when there is a large amount of people in a call.  For example, during a companywide meeting which could include 25-30 people, if my WiFi was acting up I would have trouble picking up every word.

On the 12th of March all of our face to face session with students ended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  As we were still a few weeks away from the end of the semester all of our lecturers were delivered through a virtual learning platform.  As I had delivered content online previously the switch to delivering lectures online was not new to me and I was able to record and deliver content without encountering any difficulties.  The only difficulty that I did encounter was broadband access especially towards the afternoon where sometime the connection failed. Some students found the experience enjoyable while others found it challenging as some students did not have access to broadband at home or where did they have access sometimes the connection was poor.

By ITT Tralee