Course that best prepared me to communicate within the organizational context that I encountered during your internship

 Last semester, I took a Database Management Systems course that included a service-learning project with a community partner. Although the course concepts in the course were a great start into Database Management, the communication skills I obtained from working on the project prepared me for my internship. During the course, we learned about the differences between technical and non-technical communication and different scenarios when one form is preferred to another during a project development process. Throughout my internship, I always had a less technical and more technical description of my progress or challenge that I used based on the situation. 

Around the midpoint of my internship, I had to reach out to a manager working on a feature in Microsoft Teams mobile that had a behavior like my project. Since I needed a recommendation of an Engineer on the manager’s team, I used the less-technical description of my project goal to initiate the conversation with the manager. It was after I was talking to the recommended engineer that I gave the more detailed description. I learned this skill from the Database Management course as my team worked with the Feeding Kentucky community partner who needed less-technical explanations of our project concepts to get quality feedback. Communicating information with the correct level of technicality is always the best initial step towards understanding each other, especially in product teams with different technical expertise and areas of experience like product managers and designers. I have discovered that this prevents me from overwhelming the receiver with unnecessary details and in turn earns me quality feedback.