Hi, this is Igor. I just received a confirmation for my internship at Givaudan as a Social Media Analyst.
Start of the internship.
At the end of July, I felt like I was behind the schedule of finding an interesting internship. Though, one month appeared to be enough to apply for 20 options only 4 of which responded. After considering more details I proceeded with 2 active positions: Social Media Analyst at Givaudan and Data Analyst at some consulting firm. I am not going to lie – I wanted to get the latter option. I had two interview rounds in each company with a test exercise in Givaudan. I enjoyed all interviews and succeeded in the test exercise quite well. Within several days, the preferred option notified me of their decision to move forward with another candidate. This made me agree to spend my next 6 months working with Givaudan.
It seems like I will do a lot of social media research and produce four reports per month. Moreover, I was told I will participate in some ad-hoc research on food and beverage consumption. Givaudan is the biggest company in Europe manufacturing flavor elements which in their turn are sold to other big food and beverage corporations. I am excited to see how this type of global enterprise functions from the inner side. On top of that, the tasks I will perform seem to be aligned with my interests which definitely makes me happy.
Oh, I forgot to mention… This is going to be a remote internship. I am begging to work on September 1st in Kyiv and planning to move to the Netherlands in October to work from there.
The face behind the text you are reading.
Moving to the equator of the internship.
I am three months through my full-time working experience and it feels like a real job. Of course, I have fewer responsibilities than others, but my tasks never reduce in volume. Sometimes I don’t even have time to procrastinate! However, in general, I like the work I do, especially what I learn from it. My workday is a scene each IT guy with remote setup has experienced: wake up, no time for breakfast, turn the screen on, realize you actually are very hungry, go spend an hour eating, then work till lunch, have lunch, and then moderate work till I am done for today. This doesn’t happen all the time, I certainly have a richer life than that, though during the busiest periods I am a participant in the sequence I have just described. Trying to catch up with life and balance between busy work and human joy I learned a lot about qualitative analysis, trend detection, and acquired confidence in communication with colleagues or third parties. The list of improvements is getting larger every week and I am excited to experience this dynamic.
My workstation (the closest one).
Talking about my research, it has been very difficult for me to align my tasks with Communication Science and benefit my company. To put it in a more correct way, everything I do is very related to Communication Science, though I couldn’t come up with a feasible Communication Science research that would connect my work activity and the science. This is why I proposed research that has nothing to do with my company but studies Social media posts which I work with every day. As a result, I am on a paper that will, hopefully, be done on time.
End of the internship
My contract is getting to the end very soon. I already sent the internship vacancy to a friend of mine recommending this opportunity. During the internship, I learned several important hard skills like content analysis and trend detection, but also I had a chance to see the underlining processes of a big company competing for new victories. I observed how businesses demand advanced prediction, rapid innovation, and thorough research of their consumers. All of this shed some light on commercial world functioning and its pros and cons.