Looking back at my internship, I can safely say that I learned a lot about marketing, myself and how the world works. During my period as a student of communication, it was by far the most useful thing I did. Learning about the various theories of communication that we can apply around the world is all well and nice, however I always felt that it was somewhat detached from the real world from an ontological perspective. Not to say that most of the theories weren’t interesting, not at all. I am just saying that the various theoretical models to which those theories were applied lacked a certain grounding in reality in my opinion. I will try to explain in more detail how my internship provided certain insights where the rest of my courses slightly lacked.
At Top of Minds, the company I did my internship for, I worked in the marketing department. Top of Minds is an executive search bureau, which means that it was our job to make sure that we were known to the people we have vacancies for. Part of that job was to send out newsletter to the people in our database or to post ads on LinkedIn etc. If we take sending the newsletter for example. That is a process in which many decisions have to be made. How are we going to phrase the opening line? What images are we going to use? Those are questions that, if you want to give them a meaningful answer, require some trial and error and a lot of wisdom. Luckily I found myself in a situation during my internship that I had access to that wisdom from previous trials and errors and a lot of experience. I genuinely learned a lot of things from my fellow colleagues about marketing.
I also recommend to everybody else to do an internship because you will not just learn about marketing, you will learn a lot about yourself. Maybe this will vary from person to person, but for people like me who never worked full time for a long period, doing an internship will provide insight into the life of people who work and will work like that for most of their life. For some the nine to five lifestyle is acceptable, for other it is not. It does not matter to which group you belong to, because I believe that it is paramount that everybody at least tried that experience for one in their lifetime. For some it will be a comfortable remainder of how life will look like after they graduate, for other a kick in their backside and a harsh reminder to get their life together so they can start to achieve their goals. Either way I am grateful for having this experience.