After 5 months of internship and one semester left of my bachelor, I got offered the choice to stay at the company I did my internship at. As excited as this sounds, it’s a difficult choice to make. I was very happy at the company and had a great team of colleagues around me that I wouldn’t want to miss. Still, there were some questions I was asking myself before deciding. How was I going to finish my study? Is this what I actually want to do? Am I ready for a fulltime job?
As there is no single answer to any of those questions, I just asked myself one single question. What have I got to lose?
I agreed with my team lead that I would work four days a week until I finish my study and if I ever need more time to work on my thesis, I have the freedom to take some extra days off. This is a very important agreement to make if you want to combine work and uni and don’t want to overwork yourself. I also learned during the internship that it’s very important to take some time off and take some time to get used to the ‘adult life’ in the office. Of course, most people at this stage of the study want to study for at least a couple more years and I was the same, but I also learned that office life is not so scary as I thought. Perhaps this was because of the laid-back atmosphere in the office I work and the fact that the average age in the company is about 26 years old. This makes our office feel more like a group of friends working together and sometimes being a bit more strict to each other than an office where you work just to do your work.
Overall, I’m glad that I’ve chosen to stay at the company but I would definitely recommend to only do this if you’re very good at planning and have a lot of discipline.