Internship at The Student Hotel
Nothing will get you more in tune with your inner student spirit than working at the Student Hotel. My internship started in February and although the pandemic has hindered what a full experience at TSH would have felt like, I was still able to have one of the best experiences while my six months there. Let me start in the beginning:
I applied be to an intern at The Student Hotel because when I moved to Amsterdam in 2019, my first home was at TSH Amsterdam West. Having already been a part of TSH gave me an advantage during my application process as I already had insights on TSH. I also applied directly on the TSH website instead of going through a third party like Glassdoor. Tip: Apply to internships on the companies website. I received the most replies from potential internships doing this than when I sent my application out on Glassdoor or LinkedIn.
I originally applied for a Learning and Development position, but during my interview, I made sure to highlight my strengths and why I would be so valuable to the team. I did not get the position for L&D because my interviewers believed I was much better suited for an Internal Comms position that was not being advertised yet. I was definitely excited to become a part of TSH, especially now that I would be working behind the scenes at HQ instead of being the student who lived on location.
The first few weeks at TSH have quite the learning curve and I think this applies for most internships and jobs. But once I figured out how to use all the different software’s and programs like Canva, Mailchimp, Microsoft Team, etc. everything went by much faster and smoother.
My main tasks and roles were: (1) Create the corporate newsletter that we would send out once every two weeks, (2) create the manager newsletter that would be sent out once a month, (3) help to copy edit emails, documents, etc., (4) help to coordinate events for HQ team members. These are some of the few tasks that I had during my six months at TSH, but every so often I would have different projects or work such as creating an intern network called TSH Intern Connect with my fellow HQ People Team interns.
One of the things I’ve definitely learned within the last six months is that long term goals tend to be the norm. I think as a student, we’re all very accustomed to short-term goals such as, getting an assignment done, studying for our exam, and moving onto the next course after eight weeks. But in a workplace, goals tend to span across many months of work which can be somewhat frustrating for an intern because I became a part of many different projects that I unfortunately will not get to see completed.
Regardless, working at TSH was one of the highlights for me personally during the pandemic. I became great friends with my coworkers and truly felt like I was a part of a team. I didn’t realize how often I would use what I learned in class in the real world, but I definitely learned what a real job is like and I have to say, it’s much nicer than pulling all-nighters during exam week! If you ever have the chance to work at TSH, I highly recommend it as a wonderful first-internship experience!