How I Pictured It
This experience was not at all how I imagined it would be when I first read about the mandatory internship while deciding if I would apply for Communication Science back in 2017. I had a hard time imagining it anyway; a new country, new courses and none of the people with whom I had spent the previous 19 years of my life would be around.
So, overall, when I read about the internship, I experienced a seesaw of emotions: excitement and dread. Excitement because of all the skills I would gain and the people I would meet while kick-starting my career in an office on the other side of the globe, and dread, well… because of what I just mentioned. Don’t get me wrong; although mixed, the overall feeling was that of excitement and embracement of new experiences. Only one problem: none of that would actually happen.
Not As Expected…
As we all know, 2020 hit and so did a certain something we’re all too familiar with at this point. Everything turned upside down. Before I knew it, I was back in Brazil, stuck at home, and working remotely while struggling to cope with virtual meetings and timezones. Not the internship experience I had expected 3 years prior; or even 6 months prior for that matter.
Not all was lost, though. I did get the chance to learn a lot and meet all kinds of different people. Thanks to a LinkedIn listing for a remote internship in a small U.S.- based consulting firm named She Grows It. My time at SGI has given me many practical skills and a small sense of what working in a company is like. Although I couldn’t go to the office, I still had the regular team check-ups and brainstorming sessions with my colleagues.
A Hard Beginning Maketh A Good Ending
The normal workday wasn’t at all how I expected it would be. Due to a timezone difference of 4 hours, I would regularly find myself having staff meetings at 8 p.m. local time. This made it hard to have a healthy routine and I also expect that it affected my performance. Apart from meetings, I also had to stay available during most of the day, including the entire afternoon into late evenings. However, I did enjoy long mornings to myself and used that time to myself or just sleep in. I slowly became accustomed to the routine and it didn’t bother me that much anymore.
After getting used to the day-to-day, my progress within the internship and the new skills I gained were becoming clearer. After a while, I was selected as the team leader and became responsible to lead projects involving the other communication interns. So apart from my normal day-to-day duties – such as social media management, creating web pages, doing research for marketing campaigns, and designing content for external channels – I also got to dabble with project and team management, which led to a clearer idea of what I want to do in the future. In the end, did the internship fulfill my expectations? No. Was it valuable even if not in the way it was expected? Definitely.