After reading a fellow classmates blog about being on time, I decided to leave the house two hours early to ensure there were no hiccups on the very first day of my internship, as the office location is in Beaufort Street and had no parking on site, I had to catch public transport, which is something I have not done for roughly seven years.. I was out the door by 6am, on the train at 6:20am, had a large cup of much needed coffee from good ‘ole McDonalds at 7am and walked to the Simtail office by 8am (I am supposed to start at 8:30am).
Being nervous was an understatement. I was shaky and sweaty as I walked into this beautiful, newly renovated office. As I walked in, I was greeted by not one, but two of the most important staff members, Rogue and Oska. After this encounter, I immediately felt more paw-sitive about my presence in this office (pun intended).
Rogue and Oska
I was then given a tour by the Marketing/Public Relations Manager, I met all of my team members and was guided on the tasks I would be completing during the week. It was interesting, as in my current workplace (not the internship), we are given tasks to do verbally, whereas at Simtail our tasks are provided to us through a website called “Trello” which I thought was a great idea as we were all interconnected through this website and could tick off the tasks once we had completed them.
My nice little workspace
For the first week, I would be predominantly focused on creating social media content that would be engaging to the targeted audiences. As Simtail works with many clients within the retailing industry, e.g. Measure Bar, Pure Pets Products and many more, I found this extremely fun yet challenging, as I had to conduct a lot of research to determine what these companies’ online language and audiences were like. After I created these posts, I then had to schedule them in on their website and on Facebook, thank goodness for PR Techniques! That unit actually helped me learn how to schedule content through Hootsuite! Ultimately, I had an amazing start to this internship, and to make the day even better, our director brought all our team members hot cross buns!
On the second day of my internship, I realised the importance of reading everything extremely carefully, whether it is in a professional workplace, university or in general. The previous day I had created posts for the month of March and assumed the posts I had to create this day were also in March. But I was wrong, as these posts were to be planned for April! I realised the hard way and had to replan the dates I had previously scheduled in. Although it doesn’t seem very difficult, it did take some time, as I had to create a pattern of posts, choose a specific time in the day to post them and lodge them in to be rescheduled.
My tip to all my fellow interns, please read everything carefully, even the smallest fine prints!
So far, whilst were still in early days, I can eagerly say that I am loving my internship and I am so grateful for the opportunity!