My Internship at Spotted by Locals

My name is Liana and I have been a social media & PR intern at Spotted by Locals since April, 2016 for 2.5 months. I am originally from Yerevan, Armenia but I am studying in Netherlands and have lived there for 2 years. As doing an internship was a university requirement for me I started looking for one last winter and after a long list of applications sent out I was very happy when I learned from Bart that I got the Spotted by Locals internship. As a Media & Communications major I was especially looking for a position in social media, public relations and writing and was glad to see that Spotted by Locals offered all those.

Since the internship was office-independent, meaning that I could work from whatever location I wanted, I immediately realized that it suited me as I could start it while still in Rotterdam and finish it off back in my hometown for the summer.

First of all, I was very surprised with how much knowledge I gained in the field of social media. That is to say, since I am personally very active on social media sites I always used to think that I know most of the insights there. However, while working on social media for this internship I have come to realize that running the platforms as a company and communicating the messages in the best way possible has a lot of nuances and needs to be taken seriously. I also got to know and work with a lot of social media analytical tools that I had never even heard of.

Secondly, when applying for the internship I mentioned that I really wanted to improve my writing skills. Thus, I must admit that Bart and Laura definitely gave me enough chances and space to experiment with my creativity, both when writing for our main blog and for The Huffington Post. And looking back now I can certainly say that all the writing has had a huge positive influence on my skills, especially in the sense that it helped me turn my thoughts into a text in a shorter period of time than I used to.

And finally, I was also really honoured to help the company with the expansion to Yerevan. I mostly tried to spread the news in the city and to find some Spotters. The project is still not complete but a lot has already been done and I am for sure very happy that, to some extent, I could contribute to it.

The internship didn’t come without any difficulties of course. And personally for me the biggest challenge was managing my own time as I was free to do the tasks at any time of the day I wanted. Hence, it made me become more considerate of how I was using my working hours.

To conclude, the internship at Spotted by Locals has undoubtedly been a life-changing experience that was a huge progress in my career as well as enhancing personal growth. And all this experience just wouldn’t be possible without the huge help and guidelines that I have been getting from Bart and Laura whenever I was in need for it.

In one word this internship made me realize how much I enjoy doing PR and cleared the doubts about continuing my Masters in Public Relations.

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