Working for a small start-up – especially as an intern, as I do – comes with various benefits. The boss is sweet, co-workers are super nice and timetables are what you make of them – as long as you meet your hours. Not to mention the hour-long lunchtime with the company’s friends, who are also all wonderful people and the occasional after-work beers with colleagues that you actually like, not only because they are somewhat the same age as you, but also have the same interests.
As chill as it is, however, as most things in this world, it also has some downsides. I found very early that the lack of guidance caused me to have little to no motivation to do my work. Not because my supervisor didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t. Long story short, after a few weeks of us working together, during which time I’ve been desperately looking out for any teachings she can give me about marketing strategies and social media advertising; she was very decent to have a talk with me about the situation. She pretty much told me that she highly overestimated the company’s situation regarding both its advancement and financial state. She simply had too many errands to run around the company, like emailing clients, pitching to investors, and creating presentations about the start-up, among others, to be able to make time for her interns (me and a girl from New Jersey).
As disappointing as it was at first, I had to appreciate her efforts and her transparency about the whole situation, and as much as she couldn’t give us the guidance we had hoped she would, she did everything in her power to make the experience as good as possible. At this point of time, we are still figuring out a new arrangement that works for everybody. From the looks of it, we would have to do a lot of the work on our own and search for solutions on the web or other sources whenever we bump into difficulties. Luckily, the internet is a vast source of information, especially about trending topics like social media marketing. And after all, stepping out of one’s comfort zone is said to be the best way to learn new things, so, eventually, it might work out for the best. In conclusion, the situation is definitely more difficult than I expected it would turn out to be, but trying to see it as an opportunity to learn instead of frowning upon it makes handling it much easier and it also gives me the mental space to grow. I am not sad about it, I was looking to get something else, but that doesn’t mean I will not embark on this journey with great hopes. It’s just life, I suppose. Sometimes you just have to deal with it.