Internships can be tricky, there are no universal guidelines that indicate what an internship is supposed to look like. The infamous saying ‘you’re just an intern’ can haunt one’s thoughts when they want to voice their opinion or make a change. There is no rule to say how much you can contribute or not. I believe this was my biggest worry within the internship semester, will I be sitting there and bringing them coffee? The stereotypical scenario back in the day of an intern, and as this was my first internship, I wholly expected that to be the case.
Throughout my internship at SOCIATE, I was working as a Social Media intern, I quickly saw that asking, contributing and voicing my opinion was more than encouraged. The internship host and I were alike in our personality, this created a great synergy between us. The hierarchy that I thought I should’ve felt was non-existent and interns were worshipped for their modern-day knowledge of social media marketing! It almost felt too good to be true.
Two weeks into the internship, I started to notice my time was always occupied with work. The job was 9am-6pm, 5 days a week, with little time for university, I started struggling to balance both. As an intern, my thoughts reverted to my original generic thoughts about an internship ‘I have to suck it up and this is how it is’, however, it’s not how it has to be. I was discussing this with a fellow university friend who was also doing an internship during the same time as me, they were experiencing similar problems. My original thought that I would be doing nothing had been completely shifted into realising that I have no time for anything else! My thoughts were confused whether I should request for some time for university work as we are legally allowed that, or just to be compliant. I found myself back at the same question: Am I allowed to ask for what I want or not? Because ‘I’m just an intern’.
After many conversations with my internship supervisor, who reassured me that I was completely within my right to ask for time dedicated to university work, I went ahead with scheduling a meeting with my internship host. Most of the time the only thing that is stopping for asking what for what you want, is yourself. This was proven to me, again, in our meeting. My internship host not only gave me what I asked for but asked me to reach out whenever I needed more time off for university work. This was a huge lesson for me within my internship, always ask for what you want because usually your worries are all built up internally. Societies stereotypes have trained us to believe that because you are ‘just an intern’, you can’t ask for what you want, however, most of the time, this is not the case. I will take this lesson throughout me in life, stop assuming and start asking.