My name is Chris. I am a marketing and public relations student who was looking for something meaningful to do during my summer break. I was honestly looking to get a job as a waiter or kitchen staff because I have always been passionate about food (baking in particular). However, with less than 2 months to work, it was difficult to find a place willing to hire me.
Fortunately for me, I knew Soon Seng. Long story short, I ended getting an opportunity to intern as a digital marketing/copywriting intern here at the Techy Hub (thanks, Soon Seng for the opportunity). Marketing was honestly the last thing I wanted to do (funny since I am a marketing student). But the time I spent here has been really meaningful and has made me enjoy marketing a little more.
The Humans
One of the many things that made this internship really fun and meaningful are the people who I got to meet. Since it is a small office, I got to know everyone, especially my co-intern, Ranko and boss/advisor person, Kur Win.
Ranko is one of those people who has the lamest puns in the history of the world (her puns hurt). The type that you want to try and laugh at but sometimes it just hurts. She has been the closest person I worked with throughout my internship. She is very annoying that way but has made working here fun.
She has been really helpful in helping me do certain tasks when lazy and even taught me how to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. We pitched together, made a lot of inside jokes together and amongst other things, struggled with certain tasks together. Grateful to have a co-worker who helped make work seem less dull.
The next person in Kur Win. He is a man who is always very derpy and tends to enjoy spilling liquids near us. Despite him being the way he is, Kur Win is quite smart at digital marketing. He may have studied something else in university, but his digital marketing knowledge is amazing. He’s really quiet until you start talking to him (I think at least). You can talk to him about A LOT of different topics.
Kur Win, for as much as he could be, was patient when teaching us about digital marketing. He likes to sigh at us, but I think we, Ranko and I, are his favourite interns! Grateful that he’s a patient guy considering how blur I am on most days.
Things I Picked Up
No. 1
One of the many things that I’ve learned here is how digital marketing works. More specifically, I got a more hands-on experience in doing search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media advertisements. It is quite refreshing for me as a marketing student to learn the more modern methods of marketing. I say it is refreshing because I have yet to learn about digital marketing, so all these new tactics and concepts are very interesting.
To do something I enjoyed as a high school student (writing) and combining it with digital marketing has sparked my interests. I may not be a very skilled writer, but learning how to write blogs and different types of contents have been great. It helps me see a more interesting side of marketing besides the usual things I have studied.
In the process of learning to blog, we had to experiment with different things ourselves. We had to constantly share our posts on Facebook and monitor the interaction. After that, we had to experiment with the featured image, titles, meta descriptions and a series of other factors. All of that just to find out how to increase interactivity or why a post did poorly.
No. 2
Another thing that I have picked up here is better confidence when presenting/pitching. The main difference between doing here and in university is that there is no guide. Our first presentation was on a very unfamiliar topic and without a guide which made it all the more difficult and confusing. Thanks for the really honest and constructive feedback we received, I have more confidence in approaching these kinds of things.
I honestly have a long way to go in building my self-confidence in pitching. But I am glad that I got to do it here and get really honest feedback. Thank you to all my colleagues who gave me feedback.
No. 3
There was also looking into how to search for clients, bloggers, and how to evaluate websites. With a series of tools and a lot of time and effort, these were the hardest tasks to do. Aside from using the tools to help do a basic evaluation, I feel that learning how to evaluate a website, its designs and functions and other features were fairly difficult. There are many areas to cover before making a proper judgement.
Everything that was taught to me during this short period of time has been great. I understand digital marketing slightly better, and I know how parts of it work.
Overall
While thinking about it, the one thing I realize is that the work I was given, is not just for the sake of being done. Each and every task I had to do all had a reason behind it. Every single task was very much real. There is not very much spoon-feeding here.
While Soon Seng and Kur Win may have guided me in the beginning, they do expect us to do our work properly. Like I shared earlier, there is a lot of honesty and constructive criticism. They are also always open and ready to listen to our feedback or to answer our questions. All of this really helped me learn.
The best part is that, even as an intern, you are really treated like an employee. Not once was I asked to do any jobs that a paperboy would be asked. You would think you would not get much from interning in such a small office.
Yet, the three words I would use to sum up my experience here are these:-
Purposeful, Fun, Contented.