October 2020
I am currently doing my internship at ABN AMRO Mees Pierson and I am going to share with you my impressions and feelings after the first 1 1\2 months. My internship position is called “Digital Content Expert” and I am part of the e-commerce department at ABN AMRO.
Let’s start at the very beginning: I mainly used LinkedIn to find an internship and there were actually a lot of positions available in Amsterdam, but I tried to only apply for the ones that I was really interested in. After receiving some rejections, I was very happy to find an internship at a well-known company with a job description that I was very enthusiastic about. What I also found very positive is that although ABN AMRO is a Dutch bank they were looking for an international intern as the project that I am currently working on is concerning different European private banks that are part of ABN AMRO.
I started my internship at the beginning of September and was already well integrated by my colleagues from the beginning on. As I am the first international intern at the company, and almost all employees are Dutch, it was sometimes a bit awkward that everyone needed to switch to English because of me. I am speaking in the past tense because now I am completely working from home after going to the office for 1 1\2 weeks. Besides the fact that I don’t really have the chance to get to know my colleagues in a normal working environment, I am now fine with working from home and actually enjoy that I can be a little more independent.
As the company is launching their new websites at the beginning of November, I was already given a lot of responsibility during my second week, which I was quite overwhelmed with. One of my colleagues and I are the main employees working on the websites and we still have to build around 400 pages in the next two weeks, which is also why I needed to work overtime a lot during the last few days. I am mainly in charge of the communication between the German and the Dutch team and have almost all responsibility for the German website. Each day we have a lot of online meetings with the different teams from all the countries in which they are giving us feedback on our work and we discuss every single page.
All of my colleagues are telling me that after the launch in November everything will be more relaxed which I am also looking forward to.
December 2020
After some technical issues and postponing, the websites have finally been launched. The last two weeks before the launch have been extremely stressful and I am happy it is getting a bit quieter now.
Although I might sound a little more negative than positive, I am very happy that I found this internship, and I feel like it is very valuable for me that I got to be part of such a big project that involved a lot of people. I feel like I really learned a lot about content marketing but also about myself. Although it’s sometimes a little overwhelming, I am happy that I actually get to do things and get treated like all other employees. It is to build pages and now to improve them after the launch. It’s also nice to join Team meetings with my colleagues to catch up, get feedback and see how all the work comes together.
