A Summer of Firsts: What My Internship at AEP Actually Taught Me

Or: How I showed up to learn about data and left with a new game plan

Let me start with a confession.

When I accepted my internship at American Electric Power this summer, I had a pretty simple plan in my head: learn about data. That's it. I'd gotten really into AI, and the more I dug into it, the more I realized that data is the thing underneath all of it. It's the backbone. I figured if I wanted to understand AI, I should go to the foundation and learn how the data actually works.

I got that. But I also got a whole lot of things I didn't plan for. This summer turned out to be a summer of firsts, and those are the parts I'll remember most.

My first time on a really big team!

I've done group projects. I've been on small teams. But I had never been part of something this big before, with so many moving pieces and smart people.

My first instinct was to feel small. There's a moment, when you're the new intern in a room full of experienced people, when you wonder if you're supposed to just stay quiet and take notes. But that feeling didn't last long, because the people here made room for me. They answered my questions. They let me be curious out loud. Slowly, being on a big team stopped feeling intimidating and started feeling like the coolest part of the job.

My first retirement party!

This one caught me off guard emotionally.

I went to a retirement party for someone who had been at AEP for decades. Listening to people tell stories about a career longer than I've been alive, something clicked. This isn't a place people pass through. It's a place people build lives and careers around. That does something to how you see a company. It made the whole summer feel less like a line on my resume and more like I got to be a small part of something with history and roots.

My first time presenting something major!

And then there was the big one. My first time standing up and presenting something I actually built, in front of people who genuinely know their stuff.

I spent my summer split between two worlds. One half was data governance, learning how an organization makes its data trustworthy, who owns it, what it means, and where it comes from. The other half was on the AI side, where I got to explore a question that's simple to ask and hard to answer: How do we know an AI model is safe to use?

Presenting that work was nerve-wracking in the best way. I walked away understanding trustworthy AI is built on trustworthy data. You can't have a model people trust without data people trust first. Governance is the foundation. AI is what you build on top of it. I learned the same lesson from two different directions.

What I'm taking with me

I came into AEP wanting to understand data because it's the foundation of AI. I'm leaving understanding that, and a lot more.

I celebrated someone's decades-long career. I found my footing on a big team. I presented something I was proud of. And I met a whole lot of people who reminded me that the best companies aren't just built on good work, they're built on good people.

This summer was my halftime show. I've got two years of college behind me, and now I'm heading into the third. This internship was the moment in the middle that changes how you play the rest of the game.