How COVID-19 affected my internship

Hello everyone and welcome to my first “Storytime” blogpost! I asked you guys on Twitter what you wanted to see with a poll. There was a tie between ‘Internship stories’ and ‘Childhood stories’, so I choose to write about my internship at Studio 8.

Now that you’re all UP2DATE (see what I did there 😉 ), it’s time to tell some stories! Of course, I’m going to talk about COVID-19 because it had some huge effects on my internship.

The start of something new

I started my internship the 1st of March of 2020, and back then everything was still normal. I’ve my team mates, team Connected and my coaches in real life, and each team had its own “office”. The offices were medium-sized, white rooms with huge windows across the furthest wall. We were allowed to decorate the offices with things from home to make us feel at home. Our office was decorated with fairy lights and we had a projector that we used for presentations. We also brought extension cords because the room only had two plugs.

The first week of the internship, we had workshops almost every day. We had workshops about project management, creative thinking, and one workshop about Adobe After Effects. That same week, we had three project briefings with our clients. The week after that, COVID-19 came to Belgium and we had to go in quarantine.

The effect of the virus

The effect of the virus was immense! Every Wednesday, we were going to have weekly meet ups with the coaches to reflect on the week. These ‘Weekly Standups’ became ‘Daily Standups’ by using Microsoft Teams. If you don’t know Microsoft Teams: imagine if OneDrive and Skype would have a baby together. We already used Microsoft Teams as a OneDrive to easily share documents with each other. Now, it became even more important because the whole internship was on Microsoft Teams.

It was very surreal. One day, you sit together in the office with your team and next day you’re told that your whole internship is spent online. I kind of liked that, because I’m an introvert and I tend to be shy around other people. I was also more comfortable in my own house and most importantly: you could work in your pajamas and nobody could see that! 😀

After Easter Break a new team joined Studio 8, team Beyond. These students didn’t have an internship anymore, because those were cancelled due to COVID-19. I can’t really imagine how that must have felt like.

Would I recommend this kind of internship? YES! If you ever get the chance to do a similar internship like this one, you should really do it. COVID-19 didn’t really have a negative effect on the internship, which I’m glad for. If I got the chance to rewind time, I would have chosen the exact same internship.