“Insurance is for old people!”, “What is reinsurance?”, “B2B is boring!”
Those are some of the phrases I had to encounter nonstop when I told people my age that I am currently doing an internship at Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company.
If I am being very honest, before I started the internship, I did not know much about the reinsurance business myself and followed the wide-spread perception that working in a niche B2B industry is quite boring. But I accepted the challenge and well, what can I say? I was wrong!
A typical day in the life of a communications intern at Munich Re
Following a typical 9-5 structure, I would usually start my day at work around 9am. As I lived quite close to the office, I always enjoyed a beautiful morning bike ride through Munich’s old town and the Englischer Garten. Once I got to the office, I would head to my desk to check emails. To keep track of my tasks I kept a journal to note down everything that I needed to complete that day. Every day at 10am, the Media Relations team had a call where we updated each other about new media inquiries, upcoming interviews, or media trainings. During that call, the team also communicated their daily tasks for me which usually were some sort of thematic research for upcoming interviews or creating journalist profiles and briefings. After this call, I most of the time was consulting with my primary supervisor about the current state of our various projects and events. By the time we finished, it was usually almost lunch time. One of the benefits about working at Munich Re is that they offer free lunch every day. This also means that lunch time is THE time to connect with your colleagues. After lunch, you usually get coffee with your colleagues before you head back to the desk and dedicate yourself to work again. The rest of the day for me looked different every day. Sometimes I had other group meetings discussing projects, sometimes I had one-on-one meetings with my manager, and sometimes I had no meetings and solely focused on my work and got things done without the interruption of a meeting. I would usually end my day at 5pm as most of my colleagues did.
Tips if you aim to pursuit an internship in Coms at Munich Re
Communication: what seems quite obvious for someone being interested in communications, is not always considered in practice. Being communicative about your expectations, your workload and how you are managing your function within the team are important topics of conversation within an internship. During my time at Munich Re, I was very lucky to have such a supporting environment that encouraged be to openly communicate how I was feeling, both negative and positive aspects of that.
Connect: as I already mentioned in the previous parts of this post, Munich Re’s culture is strongly focused on connecting with people and engaging in a dialogue with your colleagues, within and outside on Coms. It is expected from you to actively go up to people and introduce yourself, ask them if you want to go for a coffee or lunch, and seek out if you need help. I can assure you that for me, it was quite challenging in the beginning as I am rather introverted in nature. However, once I started opening up and being more approachable for my colleagues and got to know them on a deeper level, my performance at work increased and I was way more comfortable in my role.