So far, I have been helping the Business School with a lot of the admin/data entry required to get accredited. It involves a lot of cross-referencing with multiple Excel spreadsheets, making sure the information in the Business School database is up to date and that the university website also has the most up to date records. I’ve loved working at the Business School because I’m a Business School student and getting to see the array of courses and what each one entails has been very enlightening. I’ve found out a lot about each course when reading through and using the course guides to filter out the information that I need which I’ve found very interesting.
A day in the life for me is usually spending the morning doing my own things such as some revision or lectures and then working in the evening. Sometimes I’ll need to leave during the evening for extra-curriculars, but I just catch up on the time missed after I’m back home. The skills I’ve greatly improved are my time management and organisation because trying to juggle the internship, university work and my personal life was a big challenge at first, but I managed to balance them all by designating my attention to each task completely at certain times before moving on to the others. I also always make sure that I have time set aside just to wind down so that it doesn’t feel like too much especially while working with a screen. Screen fatigue is a very big issue, but I always take regular breaks in between the work. Power naps are also great just to rest your eyes for a little bit before you start working again.
The internship so far has been a great experience for me, everyone that I work with is very helpful and they’re also very understanding about anything you might be going through which affects your work. Last term I was struggling with a personal problem which affected my university work and the internship but having a talk with my supervisor and working out another schedule made it a lot easier to handle my workload and I am very grateful for it. I switched to working from home from December and found it easy to adjust to the transition. I just needed to communicate with what I needed to do with my supervisor with weekly updates.
My top tips for balancing deadlines and workloads would just be to space things out and organise them better. Create a little schedule for when you want to work and when you want to revise/complete university deadlines. If you’re feeling bored of one task it’s also good to just switch to the other task if you feel unmotivated and then come back after a little bit. Sometimes university deadlines have priority and so if during the week it isn’t possible to complete your contracted hours, it’s good to let your supervisors know so that they can help you or so that you can catch up on the work at some other time. I’ve had many times where I had to complete my 15 hours during the weekend or at random hours during the day, but my supervisors were very understanding about it. This internship definitely has improved a lot of my skills, from time management and organisation to IT and cross-checking, and it’s also in line with what I would want to do in the future so gaining experience as valuable as this has been a wonderful experience.
