Internships Now Available — A Summer Experience
--
Over the years I’ve unconsciously developed a habit of saying “yes” to pretty much anything that sounds exciting. Even if it’s something I’ve never done before. I like the challenge I guess? That’s how I’ve developed most of my skills — saying “yes” & being thrown into the deep end but learning everything in the process.
- ❓ “Help me with this?” Sure.
- 🚀 “Want to join this startup?” Yes.
- 🇺🇬 “Travel to Uganda with me?” Why not.
- 🍕 “Hungry? Food?” Definitely yes. Anytime.
“Can I shadow what you do?” 🖥
You’ve guessed it — it was a YES. An internship for secondary school students. Turns out that my previous blog article inspired a couple of students to reach out to me.
They probably wanted to see how much of this “fun” existed in reality OR they simply wanted to experience what my world of startup & entrepreneurship was like. Having no “work time” (but working all the time), prioritizing what requires attention, figuring it out in the process and always learning. Sounds great to get four extra helping hands; but here was the issue: they couldn’t code or design digitally, they didn’t have any experience in startups, business or sales. But…
I remember how I learnt everything I currently know. Exposure & learning while doing. Every professional was once an amateur. At the very least I would have the opportunity to introduce them into the world of entrepreneurship & startups.
As things turned out, I was going to be primarily focusing on 🅿arkpnp for two weeks in July before we publicly push the app. An ideal two weeks period for others to learn by helping out & gaining insights — along with me and through some friends, with whom I’ve previously worked with; current & previous co-founders, co-organizers and leaders in the startup scene.
The most I’ve learnt was by building startups from scratch. I wanted them to gain experience in a similar way. Over the two weeks they came up with a project called Stuture— Student Future. Their motive was to help out other secondary school students to gain experience and expose them to entrepreneurship. Similar to how they had the opportunity during the two weeks. Scaling down from what their dream platform would do, their MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was to create a blog to validate their idea and gain traction.
It’s hard to describe all the activities we got up to, but here’s a brief summary:
- 💡 Brainstorming & lean canvas session to create their own startup.
- 🎨 Session about branding and importance of design.
- 🖌 Session on app design & user driven development.
- 🎬 Met many of my friends in the startup scene to learn about what they do, how they got started & explore entrepreneurship further.
- 🚗 Alongside all the meetings and learning sessions we had, they also assisted in some work for parkpnp — design, research & feedback.
- ➕ a lot more… Hard to believe how the two weeks flew by…
During all this we had a blast of a time! 🚀
I was inspired — by their motivation. To willingly give up 2 weeks of their summer holidays to learn and gain new experience. I recall the repeated emails we exchanged months ago. What still stands out from all those emails was their persistence — pushing for making those two weeks happen, even when I wasn’t sure if I would be available. This is now a story I share when I talk to students about experience & persistence. You don’t always have to be “hired” to gain experience (more on that in a separate blog post)…
I loved those two weeks. I’ve always loved giving back to the community; especially back to students. We had a lot of fun but above all, I’ve made some great new friends. This is my part of the story… you can read about their two weeks’ experience from their blog: stuture.com. 📄
What’s next? 🦁
When is the next internship? I’m not sure. Maybe next summer? 🤔 ☀️
This was a looooong overdue blog post… Finally published after 3 months! 😭
