A summer internship experience

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 was also able to become more accustomed to dressing professionally more frequently. Arriving to work promptly required me to figure out when to leave my house to catch the bus on time. I was never given a task that I was incapable of accomplishing, but if there was ever something I needed clarification on then all I had to do was ask. I helped design a campaign for PREP 4 SUCCESS and this is something that I am very glad I experienced.

The campaign itself was a real project — not a training exercise, not something that would be quietly discarded after I left. It involved thinking about the audience, what message would actually reach them, how to make something feel relevant to young people who might not otherwise engage. I contributed ideas in meetings where the other people in the room had years of experience I didn't. Some of my suggestions were used. That was a different kind of learning than anything I'd done at school.

Dressing for work was something I'd underestimated. Not because I thought it was unimportant, but because I hadn't realised how much it shapes how you feel about yourself before anyone else has even seen you. Getting it right became a way of signalling to myself, each morning, that the day was being taken seriously.

The bus schedule was a small but precise lesson in logistics. Miss it by two minutes, arrive late, spend the whole morning slightly off-balance. Get there with five minutes to spare, settle in, start well. I stopped leaving at the time that would get me there just in time, and started leaving at the time that would get me there comfortable. That's a distinction that sounds obvious and that I needed to learn in practice to actually understand.

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.