I have been interning in London for the past 3 and a half months and there has definitely been a fair share of ups and downs. While you are a student, interning at least once expands your knowledge and experience in different ways. One of the main things I have learnt is how hard I need to try to do well in life, success is not going to be thrown at me.
Internships offer you a lot of experience that you don’t even realise. Although you get the backlash of ‘being the coffee maker’ or getting stuck unscrewing a table to pack away, internships leave you with different skills that a paid job would not give you.
First of all, you are able to learn about the company without pressure. An unpaid internship gives you a certain amount of freedom to teach yourself everything you can in the short amount of time you that are there and motivate yourself to take away all the information that you can. That is why you are working there and the idea is to learn about the business without feeling the pressure to do so. Your colleagues know that you are not a professional and are there to learn new skills, so they won’t expect to much from your work.
Doing more than one short internship will get your foot into the door of many different companies. It is all about networking! Meeting lots of new people is healthy for your future career and you want to make a good impression. These are connections that you have now made for life, and can help you in the foreseeable future. Internships are all about learning, so because you are working for free, it is best to get yourself stuck into absolutely everything. While working at Jane Carr in London, I was able to photograph the launch of their new designer scarf at Fortnum & Mason with extremely important people in the fashion industry. I also worked at their pop up shop on Marylebone high street but this is all because I offered and threw myself into the work. Working for a short amount of time at an internship can give you a taster of what you want to do in the future without any real commitment. As you are working unpaid you have to ability to leave whenever you want and start something new if you feel like it is going nowhere.
Interning is like a test drive for your career, there is no harm in gaining a lot of different experiences while we are young. Whether you hate it or love it, they teach you life skills that you won’t get from anywhere else. My placement year so far has taught me that success doesn’t just arrive at your doorstep, you have to work hard to get where you want to be. Jane Carr (where I interned) is an extremely successful designer scarf company which started from nothing. Although it has taught me that I don’t want to work in high end fashion, I never would have known that if I didn’t give it a test drive. In life you have to throw yourselves into these opportunities because they don’t come around very often.
