Internships are more than a simple step into the working world, they are a useful experience for the discovery and the realization of one’s career interest and a great opportunity to put the learned theory into practice.
As students, we all need to go through the fulfillment of at least one internship at some point, and this is why I want to share my personal experience to help give some insight into what an internship might look like.
I recently completed my internship in television production and social media at RTL Belgium, one of the two national televisions in Belgium located in Brussels. I completed this internship as part of the Communication Science Bachelor program as my last step before graduating and I must admit this internship was not easy to find. After coming back from an exchange program and applying for a long time at several internship positions in different countries, I decided to look for an internship back home in Brussels and switch back to a full French-speaking environment after being immersed in a fully English-speaking setting for the past three years, which I can say it was quite challenging.
It was a very enriching experience, and by working there for three months, I could explore the functioning of television, radio, and all the production the company created. Since I wasn’t followed by my internship host supervisor, I had the freedom to choose which people to work with every day, which made this experience diverse. Based on my interests, I decided to work half of the time with the television production team and the other half with the social media team. I had the chance to see how TV shows are created and how big social media pages organize their publications. Moreover, I am mostly grateful that I was taught how to use Adobe programs such as Photoshop or Premiere for video or photo editing, something that I wasn’t able to learn before.
Since it was a big company and the duration of the internship wasn’t relatively long, it was hard to connect with people and make meaningful relationships with my colleagues. Still, overall, this experience taught me a lot about myself and the career prospects I would like to pursue in the future. By working in two different departments, I was able to understand what I would like to pursue as a future career path, I’ve always been fascinated by the film and television industry, but I’ve quickly realized that it’s not a field I would like to work in the future.