Internships, as part of the third year of studies at Creative Business HU, are a great way to discover what kind of company students would enjoy working for and what job position they would like to pursue in the future.
Or better put, that is what one of our students, Miriam says: “You have five months to figure out whether you like an internship or not, so at the end of your internship you can say – I’d like to work this or here in the future – or say surely that no, I would not like to do this, I wanna look for something else”.
Miriam is doing her internship at Discovery Benelux within the social media department. In this digital and social media internship, she found herself helping the internship supervisor to manage the social media accounts of Discovery – a process that would start from creating and posting, to analyzing and improving the content.
Looking back at the process Miriam went through to find the internship, she says “I took a very technical approach to it”. She went through a database of where other Creative Business students took their internship, and she started her research there, thinking what kind of tasks she would like to do and for what company – in short, what would get her excited for five full months.
She recommends that other students look at the tasks the vacancy implies, and look for something that challenges them the most, something that they would really like doing.
“It’s nice to apply your knowledge from the study”, she says.
It’s very important to make sure to take all the time for searching and applying for internships because you want to make sure it’s something you would enjoy, as you will spend most of your time in the coming five months doing that.
A part Miriam says is important to mention is the change from studying to working, as it can get very tiring to stick to a 9 to 5 schedule, as she heard from other CB fellows too. So take your time to get used to that.
At the beginning of her internship, she realize that when interning, especially at a bigger company, it’s very important to take into consideration colleagues’ busy schedules – when wanting to schedule calls and meetings, she had to plan accordingly even one week or more ahead of time.
Within the company, Miriam’s daily tasks include doing research (such as looking at the competitor’s social media posts, analyzing engagement to improve the social media account), preparing posts for social media account, (looking up pictures, writing the copy and scheduling them). She also works on the leave behind project for university which for her includes a lot of market research. But it’s fun to have exciting tasks such as working with Photoshop, creating posts for social media channels there, as it helps her get going.
She thinks that in the workplace, it is expected to know how to look for answers – to be proactive in that sense. Of course, interns get to ask many questions, but in the end, it really is the student’s own learning experience and what they make out of it.
One of the most rewarding experiences within the internship was when she wrote one of the first reports for the work placement. Students had to take interviews with different colleagues in the company. She got the chance to learn a lot about the company culture, organisation structure and really how people interact with each other within the company, but on a deeper level, as she had interviews as long as half an hour. She wanted to find out many different things: how employees talk to each other, the organizational structure of the company or how employees feel and relate to it. Miriam got the chance to figure out who worked with or how each department within the company works. It really was getting a step closer to deeply understanding the company.
In the end, she has some advice for other students “Always challenge yourself. You will have only five months to prove yourself and work within a company structure. So it’s little time to get to know the company and to get to know yourself within the company. I would say you have five months to figure out whether you like this or not, so at the end of your internship you can say – I’d like to work this or here in the future, or say surely that no, I would not like to do this, I wanna look for something else. But at least you have the evidence to back up – I have done this, and I have challenged myself in this, and that also proves why I want or don’t want to work at this company.”