Hi, my name is Ella and I will be blogging about my Virtual Internship with a company based in India over the next 2 months! During this time, I will make weekly blog posts that reflect on my experiences, benefits and my learnings.
As my internship has an industry focus on communications, my role is to help boost the companies SEO by writing blog posts. Having had no idea what SEO was and having never written a blog post this time 2 weeks ago, it is safe to say I was pretty nervous!
This past week has been my first working with the team and it has been really interesting! I have been given my first task of writing 4 blog posts by the end of week 2 with a focus on 2 keywords. Here are some of my key take-away points from this week:
- Firstly, research takes time!
As I am completing 20 hours per week with the internship, I do around 4 hours of work per day. I found that this week the majority of the time I spent working, I spent researching!
While this is not that surprising considering my limited knowledge at the beginning of the week, I definitely think that I can be more careful with my resources in future.
- Secondly, use the team!
This brings me to my second point which is to use the team. The support behind me so far with my VI has been fantastic. My supervisor is incredibly approachable and my coordinator from the programme is too.
This week I learnt that when your supervisor says you can ask for help, they mean it! I think that I could have cut down the amount of time I spent working on my tasks if I had have asked for help initially.
- Finally, it's normal to feel like an imposter initially.
This week one of the issues I had initially was feeling like I knew nothing and that I shouldn't be there. I felt overwhelmed when I thought about the knowledge I lacked.
However, this changed when I was reminded that the VI program is about learning and that the team I work with, especially my supervisor, want me to succeed. The encouragement I have felt and the mentoring I have received, have helped me immensely. I have realised that it is okay to recognise that I am still learning and that I am not a liability!
Overall, this week has been insightful and left me excited to see what next week will hold!