So, you’ve finished all your compulsory courses and now it’s time to start looking for an internship? Or maybe you’re just looking to do an internship as a part time job alongside your studies? If you’re anything like me, you probably had the idea of doing an internship at a big corporation, like Heineken or Phillips, and starting your corporate-business-girl era. At least that’s what I had in mind, but somehow one thing lead to another and I ended up in a newly born start up, working alongside a small but efficient team.
The benefit of working for a start-up is that you get a lot more responsibilities, as there may not necessarily be multiple small teams working on different tasks, but individual people who oversee their own tasks. For example, at Flouria Health B.V., there was no “Content and communication manager” for me to report to, but instead the CEO, who I worked closely with. In addition to taking responsibility and issue ownership of my work and the topic female fertility, I was allowed to catch a glimpse of what the daily tasks of the CEO, CTO, and CMO look like. As someone who inspires to be a CEO as well one day, and running their own company, this was an excellent reality check into what it’s really like and what I can expect.
So why should you consider Flouria Health B.V. as a place where you do your internship? One day, I would like a book. And to write a book you really need to practice and refine your writing skills. Working at Flouria, this was the perfect opportunity to practice my writing skills and develop my speed and quality of writing. In addition, my inner activist, social rights enthusiast and feminist were set free, and I could work in an organization that I felt was actually making a change in society and making the world (one country at a time) more equal in providing women the quality health care that they need and deserve. I hadn’t realised before just how complicated the Dutch health care system is and how unequal treatment is. In addition, I found out that it is a norm for Dutch women to seek treatments and health care abroad as in the Netherlands, female health care is not taken seriously enough at all. This sparks fury in me, but this was a great motivator to work hard and help to create in a system that really needs healing.