A three days in the office kind of experience
My internship experience started in a somehow rough way. If there is one major learning I got out of this slow start is what a bad internship looks like and how to avoid it.
Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending.
I will start from the very beginning.
The slow start
Last August I decided it could have been a good idea doing my internship abroad considering I did not participate in an Erasmus or exchange program before. Driven by the desire to experience living and working in London, I decided to look for an internship in the British capital.
One detail I was not aware of, job description could have been fake or exaggerated.
I got an internship at an educational institution in London after an interview with the manager of the company. The position I was supposed to cover was of Marketing intern and the job description mentioned tasks such as competitor analysis and development and management of the social media plans and other very marketing-related tasks.
Little did I know that this internship was nothing about the above-mentioned tasks. The one and only task I was assigned to was to create Facebook posts and sell as much as possible. After less than two weeks in the company, I applied for other internships both in London and in Amsterdam and four weeks after I was moving back into the Dutch capital to start an amazing internship at Cleeng.
What I learnt from this experience is to never be quiet if something does not feel right from the very beginning. In this case, for me, the position was not challenging enough and I did not like the atmosphere in the office, dominated by the idea of getting the work done by the end of the eight hours and going home without ever questioning whether what we were doing was correct.
The second start
My internship experience finally began on March 6th when I started working at Cleeng, a SaaS platform designed for Over-the-Top (OTT) services, mainly focused on Subscriber Retention Management. My position in the company was the one of Digital Marketing Intern and this time, the tasks I was assigned to truly respected what I was promised.
The excitement of the first days was soon over when I was sent on smart working on my third day at the office. Overall, I believe this was the most difficult part of the experience as I had to learn about the very complex company all by myself without gaining pieces of information from the co-workers in the office.
It took me much more time than usual to get used to all the concepts and the specific terms used within and outside the company and this made me feel like I took another wrong decision regarding my internship semester.
The happy ending
Eventually, I managed to turn this situation into a useful learning experience. Instead of focusing on my tasks only, I started to closely observe the behaviour within the company. More precisely, I directed my attention on how the management team behaved and communicated to their employees.
I can conclude affirming that this months at Cleeng have been crucial in my understanding of where I want to focus professionally after my Master. Moreover, I learnt a lot about how a correct communication looks like and it is perceived when the management team really cares about their employees and is interested in the wellbeing of everyone in order to achieve better collective results.