Getting closer to the end of my internship, I can’t help but think of what I’ve learnt in the past few months. What do I know now that I didn’t know back then?
For those of you who don’t know, my name is Laura von Waldersee and I did an internship at a food company called Stach during the first semester of 2020-2021. This company is based in Amsterdam but has stores all over the Netherlands. Before starting my internship, I often wondered how come my University asked students to devote one semester to an Internship. I thought that the working came after the studying, so why would we mix them up?
Now that my Internship is almost over, I understand exactly why my University wanted us to intern. It’s simply because in the work environment you gain such different qualities compared to than you do hidden behind a book in the library.
I believe that the most important lessons I’ve learnt are those that I would have never learnt at University. Therefore, I would like to share these tips with you:
Separate your emotions from your professional problems
How often has it happened that I performed a task and I made mistakes and consequently get upset and felt as if I was disappointing my team. If I could go back in time, I would have told myself that doing mistakes is fine, hell, it’s even important to do them! It’s in our rights as an intern to do them. We were hired by a company to learn how it’s like to work in a professional team, and a big part of learning is doing mistakes. My tip is: whenever you mess up, focus on the problem and not on your emotions. If you focus on your emotions the problem won’t get solved, and you’ll only tear yourself down even more. Whilst if you focus on solving the professional problem, very soon you’ll find out that this problem isn’t even that bad!
Always double check
Double-checking is key to efficient working. One should always try to do a given task however one thinks it’s best, however, sometimes this is still not enough. But how should we know? If we’re giving something our all and we think it’s perfect, how should we know it should be different? The answer is pretty easy: just ask. Before my internship, I often thought that avoiding to double-check would be easier for everybody, mainly because I would not disturb my busy boss. But every time I didn’t double-check if my work was good, something would go wrong, and I had to start all over again. A quick “hey, is this ok?” won’t harm anybody, and it is very important to ask that question.
It’s OK to say no!
This is something that none of us students have ever learnt at university. Whenever we had a course in which we were given extremely complicated books to read, told to submit an enormous amount of assignments in a tiny amount of time, or if we were asked to study for five exams in one week, what could we do about it? Not a lot really. We couldn’t ask our professor to change the date of some exams or get a free pass. As a student, you have to find a way to keep up, and saying no is not an option. However, at work, if you are overloaded with tasks and on top of that your supervisor gives you even more things to do, it is extremely important to let him or her know that this is too much! It is OK to say no.