After 3 positive and 'wow-look-how-great-my-life-is' blog posts, I take some time to put things into perspective.
At the beginning of the summer break, I started looking for an internship. If I'm being honest, I was quite convinced that I, with my portfolio, would find really fast an internship. Well, that turned out differently...
I talked with people about my search, sent a lot of e-mails to different companies but at the end of the summer break, nobody replied and I had still no internship. In the perfect scenario, I would have my internship before I arrived in Southampton but that wasn't the case.
My school in Southampton started and I still hoped to get an answer from the companies I sent e-mails to in the summer break, so I left my search for what it was.
By the end of September, I still didn't have a company, and the deadline to submit an internship company came closer every day. I texted my family and close friends that I was really worried because I didn't know what I did wrong. I showed my portfolio and CV to everyone and they said that it looked fine.
My last option was to call companies to ask if they wanted to hire me as an intern. To be honest, I just wanted an internship and the company didn't matter anymore, so I wasn't longer critical and threw my 'demands' away.
On the 20th of October, I saw an internship advertisement that was made for me by a company that I already follow for a really long time. I was convinced, I really wanted that place for my internship, so I decide to transform my whole portfolio into a video clip that took less than 2min. watch. It was a risky move I think because I didn't have the chance to write information by my pictures and videos. You can watch the video here
After a week, they still didn't reply (I thought) so my stress level increased every day and all this combined with difficult school classes and lack of sleep made my days heavy. On the 10th of October, I couldn't sleep well and I checked my spam e-mails in the middle of the night (after a while I was bored of the social media apps ;) ) The e-mail of the last company sat in my f*cking spam folder. I felt like an idiot because they replied a week after I sent my portfolio. The day after I discovered this stupidity I e-mailed them back.
Fast forward, last Friday (22/10/2021) we did an online meeting and they hired me as their intern!!!!! I texted all my close friends immediately after this good news. I think they were sometimes even more relieved than I was.š
Even now my school deadlines are coming closer and I still have a lot to do, this news took away 80% of the daily stress I had. I used this weekend to rest a bit and my plan now is to enjoy my Erasmus journey for 100%. I'm already halfway but there are cool things coming, so stay tuned!
'Here you see a visualisation of all the companies that replied on Marijke's e-mails' Picture By Jolien Wilke