A summer internship experience

The summer before my second year of university, I applied for an internship at a community organisation. I didn't think I'd get it. I had no professional experience, a CV that was slightly too long and not specific enough, and a vague idea of what the role would actually involve. They called me back anyway.

The first thing that surprised me was how quickly the formality became normal.

Within a couple of weeks, I'd stopped noticing the commute, the routine, the way a professional day has a different weight to it than a student one. Things I'd anticipated as difficult — showing up every day, being reliable, fitting into an environment that wasn't built around me — turned out to be manageable, once I'd just started doing them.

I also had to become more accustomed to dressing professionally more frequently. At university, what you wear barely registers. In an office, it does — not because anyone said anything, but because I could feel the difference between mornings when I'd made an effort and mornings when I hadn't. The clothes were a signal to myself as much as to anyone else.

Arriving to work promptly meant that I had to figure out when to leave my house to catch the bus on time. This sounds small. It wasn't, really. It was the first time I'd had to organise my mornings around something that didn't flex around me. The job started at nine. The bus left at eight-twenty. If I missed it, I was late and there was nothing to negotiate.

I was never given a task that I was incapable of accomplishing, but if there was ever something I needed clarification on, I had to ask. This was the part I found hardest at first — not the asking itself, but the admission that I hadn't understood something the first time. I got over it quickly, because the alternative was sitting with confusion and producing work that showed it.

I had to help design a campaign for PREP 4 SUCCESS, and this is something that I am very glad I experienced. PREP 4 SUCCESS is a programme aimed at preparing young people for professional life — which, given where I was at the time, felt like a particularly direct brief. The campaign involved thinking about the audience, the message, and how to make the material feel relevant to people who might be exactly where I had been six months earlier. Some of what I contributed was used in the final version. Seeing it finished, knowing I had a part in it, was different from anything I'd done at school.

That last part is the one I keep coming back to. Being given something real — not a simulation, not a practice run, but an actual piece of work that would go out and exist in the world — changed how I thought about what I was capable of. There's a particular kind of confidence that can only come from having done something. Not been told you could do it. Done it.

What I remember most is not the tasks themselves but the feeling of being taken seriously. Of sitting in meetings where decisions were made and understanding that my contribution, however small, was part of the outcome. That's not something you can manufacture in a classroom, and it's not something I'd fully understood the value of until I'd experienced it.

I'm grateful for the people who trusted me with work before I'd given them much reason to. That trust was the thing that made everything else possible.