When I looked for internships, it was a pain to find something. I sent more applications and received more rejections than I ever had in my entire life before. But what do you do when you don’t want to extend your studies? You keep going.
And after 42 wonderfully handcrafted internship applications, I finally found one. Although I did not think I had a very good chance at getting the position, I was very pleasantly surprised to have gotten an interview at the organization I got an internship at. The road had been hard and after pretending to care about electrical car charging stations and getting rejected by Startups because they found someone with more experience, I finally found an organization that did not turn me down immediately. The first talk to my current supervisor was rather exciting. She talked a lot about the company and herself and we easily found ourselves thinking of the same associations when talking about the company. I quickly realized that she liked me (but how can you truly tell that through a screen). Following the first interview followed a case: Preparing a task that I enjoyed (and had nothing to do with electrical car charging stations) and presenting it and my thoughts behind it. The presentation went very well, and I was offered the position of international creative content intern mere hours after the second call had finished.
And so finally, the busy little bee found her beehive and I started my internship at de Bijenkorf last February. I got to know the whole team (online) and started working from my little studio apartment. The days were rough, especially in the beginning. Working with programmes that I had not worked with before proved to be somewhat of a challenge. Especially when no one can quickly look over and show you how it is supposed to be done. But working remotely also allowed me to cry in peace when I still did not understand something or was hit by a wave of impostor syndrome. All in all, working from home had its ups and its downs, but it worked out in the end. Once one overcomes the strategic hurdles of trying to socialize online and simply gives in to the idea that no one truly must know who you are, answering questions regarding your favourite location to travel to are easily answered. It also showed me that I am capable of handling situations myself even with no one around and that most programmes for creating creative content and customer journeys are not rocket science.
I would like to finish this by emphasizing that there are few things that mess up your chances of getting an internship. And now that I found and completed an internship during a pandemic in a country, I do not speak the language of, I think that I can safely say that I can do anything without trousers on.