I just finished my 10-month internship (Aug 23 – May 24) at Versuni, formerly known as Philips Domestic. It was a valuable experience working at Versuni, the best employer of 2024, as a product management intern in the business unit.
Since the Netherlands is our headquarters and the goal of our team is to deliver products (including packaging and marketing toolkits) on time and ensure their high quality, we closely collaborate with the marketing team, design team, R&D, supply chain, and local markets. All challenges I encountered can be categorized as “collaboration questions.” The biggest challenge for a large international company is how to gather all stakeholders, align them, and ensure they are taking their responsibilities. We don’t speak the same languages; we are not in the same country, and we are not even in the same time zone. How do we achieve one goal?
Everyone is unique, and we have different working styles. You can choose friends like you, who you prefer spending time with, but you can’t choose your colleagues. One common thing in corporate life is that you have to work with people who have very different working styles from yours.
Here are some tips I gained from this internship:
- Stay calm. If your colleague did something that made you really angry, remember that there may be reasons behind it, possibly personal issues they don’t want to mention. Your goal is to complete the task, not to judge your colleague’s working style.
- Provide all information concisely in one go. Never assume the receivers know everything. Keeping everyone on the same page is one of the most difficult things in corporate life, especially in a big company. If you want to collaborate smoothly, provide some background and indicate whom they should reach out to for more details. Use images and bullet points to make your emails easier to understand.
- If a colleague never shows up in meetings, how do you reach out to them, especially if they are not in your office? Ask your supervisor for help. If your supervisor can’t resolve it, reach out to that person’s line manager. Don’t be afraid; you are working on your task.
- Initiate tasks instead of being pushed by deadlines. Make good use of Excel and Microsoft To-Do. Create your own task tracker in Excel to record the status of tasks. For team collaboration projects, upload the Excel file to a shared location so everyone can stay aligned. Track your completed tasks and show them to your boss in one-on-one meetings. This is a good way to demonstrate your progress and reflect on your own growth. Microsoft To-Do can connect emails with tasks to provide more context.
There are some other overall tips for interns:
- Build your own network. Everyone’s scope is quite different in a big company; people with the same title can do very different things. Internships are not only a chance to learn about your position but also about the domain and other teams. You might find something that interests you more through coffee chats with people from other teams.
- Be confident in yourself. Not every colleague is “nice.” If you receive some “bad feedback,” be confident in yourself. Reflect on what you have done with seniors (e.g., your internship supervisor at the company and UvA, your friends). Take it easy.