Jacqueline and her internship in Sydney, part 4

Jacqueline in Sydney: “My boss’ dog always greets me.”

A regular interning day?

Time to wake up at 7 o’clock in the morning. For three months already, I’m weirdly always awake before my alarm goes off. When I was at home I never experienced this and at first I thought it was the weather, but now it’s colder here and normally I sleep with these temperatures at home too. It’s of course not the jetlag as a 3 month jetlag would be very weird. Oh well, nothing to do about it - luckily I’m not tired when I wake up.

After getting up I get myself ready to go – the normal stuff, like in Holland – and leaving for my internship at a quarter to 8. It’s only a 10 minute walk from my home which is ideal.

The first half an hour I’m always alone with David and Stella. Stella is the dog of my boss and she always greets me in the morning. You feel welcome straight away. During this half an hour I always check my work email. Sometimes I have a new assignment in there and if not I go to David and ask for a project. The rest of the day it goes like this. I make assignments that I receive from my colleagues and ask for work when I finished everything. During my internship I work on several projects. It’s mostly small things that every intern can do. Most assignments are unfortunately not linked to my studies, but a few are. I mostly do research, social media, administration, making PowerPoint presentations, Photoshop work and I do photography and web design tasks. These are often quick and easy to do. It’s not always that I’ve got stuff to do so I bring my own laptop with me too in case I can work on the assignments from my university.

Around 1 o’clock I have lunch with the other interns, sometimes an hour, sometimes half an hour. It depends really. My company gives us an hour lunch break. When it’s nice outside we often visit the park, otherwise we go to the shopping mall. I always bring my own food with me because that’s the cheapest. After lunch there’s work to do again and then at 5 o’clock I’m finished. My normal internship hours are from 9 to 5 but I start earlier because my university wants me to make more hours.

Sometimes when I finished work, I go straight to the supermarket and otherwise straight home to cook dinner. During the evening it depends what I do. In the beginning I went to a bar often, having drinks with people to meet others, but now I’m often tired and prefer a cosy night at home. This is how my days have been since the start!