Goodbye to our Interns

Thursday last week was our Christmas party at Smartplan before the holidays. It was a nice day, which at the same time marked the end of the internship of our two interns, Louise and Maiken. We don’t know where the time went and we feel that they just started working with us yesterday! In connection with them finishing the internship, we’ve asked them to reflect on their time here at Smartplan.

What have you gained from the internship at Smartplan?

Louise: “I’ve found out what I can do with my profession and it’s been confirming for me to experience that I can actually make a difference in a company. Four years with my nose stuck in the books has given me a lot, but I always felt like something practical was missing. Therefore, it’s been very useful learning that part. From this internship, I take many competences with me, that I’ll be able to use in my future job.”

Maiken: “I got to try a lot of different things that I’ve never worked with before! At the same time, I’ve gotten great practical experience, which has been very educational. You can really feel the difference between studying at university and ‘real life’. It’s been so great being part of a real company, where you actually make a difference.”

What was the funniest part of the internship?

Louise: “It’s been fun being part of a real workplace with good colleagues. Because Smartplan is a small company, you get to know each other fast and you’re given more responsibility faster. Consequently, I leave the internship with a feeling of having contributed to as well as received a lot from Smartplan.”

Maiken: “It’s been really fun working with many different tasks, each with its own purpose. Our internship has been characterized by “freedom with responsibility”, which gave room to work independently and use our skills. And it’s been very fun making customer cases, where we interviewed and filmed some of our customers.”

What was the most challenging part of the internship?

Louise: “It’s been new to me to work with many of the tasks that I’ve done at Smartplan. Therefore, I spent time finding out what works for example when writing blog posts, press releases and articles, or when working with social media. There are a lot of easy solutions and loopholes, men those solutions are often not the ones working on the long run.”

Maiken: “Even though it’s been exciting working with completely unknown things, that’s also been a challenge. You often have this idea that it’s easy to obtain a certain result by just a few means, but that’s far from always the case. So I’ve learned that nothing comes easy and that it takes time and immersion to make everything work optimally in a company.”

What will you do in the future?

Louise and Maiken: “We’ll both start out writing our master thesis by 1 February 2016. Louise is going to write about Employer Branding and Maiken is going to write about Nation Branding in connection with the export of Danish TV dramas. Thus, the both of us are hopefully going the be cand.ling.merc. by the end of June 2016.”

What has Smartplan gotten out of the internships?

At Smartplan, we’ve gained much more than just a schedule showing who’s to bring cake when (even though that was one of the first things that Louise and Maiken introduced). We’ve raised our marketing activities to a level that was previously out of our reach as well as gotten stronger on social media and our blog. We’ve gotten closer to our customers and had the opportunity to tell the stories of some of our customers. We’ve increased our customer intake through ads and improved our status online through new content. To Smartplan, it’s been essential that Louise and Maiken has taken great initiative. We’re a small company that doesn’t have the time to create tasks for them all the time. Louise and Maiken have been extremely good at analysing a problem, define a model of solution and execute it. Such a drive is invaluable for a small company.

We’ll no doubt miss Louise and Maiken here at the Smartplan office and it’ll be very quiet, when they’re gone.They have brought dynamic, a great atmosphere, discussions and professional competency to the Smartplan office. We, of course, wish them all the best as well as good luck with their master theses.