Tell me about a time you had too many things to do. How did you decide what to prioritize? (Tell me about a stressful situation and how you handled it.)

Situation:

1. One of my top priorities when I started working at the Martinez site for my second internship was to improve my time management skills because I did not completely finish a few projects in my previous term with Marathon in the Los Angeles Refinery.

2. Coming into my second term, I knew I wanted to finish all my projects to completion, or at least complete more than my previous term.

Task:

1. I was initially given 3 different project with clear and defined scopes.

2. However, my work on these projects were delayed due to IT issues, mandatory trainings, and software installations which took up the first few weeks of my internship.

3. In addition, my mentor assigned me to work on unexpected and urgent tasks which would later become projects of their own.

4. So in total, I was assigned five projects at different times and had to manage them in parallel to complete them all.

Action:

1. Since I had projects assigned to me at different times throughout my internship, I prioritized the projects I had already been assigned to first.

2. However, whenever my mentor would assign me unexpected and urgent tasks, I would pause the work on my other projects, and immediately prioritize the most urgent issue since these tasks often stemmed from urgent technical issues, rate improvement issues, or project development issues.

3. Once the most immediate issue was identified and mostly resolved, I would return to the work on my other projects as well as continue working on the urgent tasks until they were fully resolved.

4. The best method I found when it came to completing any project or task was to effective communication, basically asking questions to those who either had the answer or knew who to redirect me to who had the answer.

Result:

1. Towards the end of my internship, I would say 2-3 weeks before, I actually completed the majority of my projects.

2. About a week before my end date, I completed all 5 projects and was actually assigned 3-4 more smaller tasks to complete since I had extra time.

3. As a result of my time management improvement, I had extremely positive feedback from my mentor on my final performance review.

4. This experience was extremely valuable to me because I learned how to become more productive and showed me how unpredictable a refinery can be.