My Internship at Spotted by Locals

Image by Jet Veenhoff

Hi, my name is Jet, im 21 years old and I have been doing an internship at Spotted by Locals for the past 3 months! I’m Dutch, and I study arts & culture. I study in Rotterdam at Erasmus, and my study is an international study. That means it’s in English, but also all of my peers are from all over the world! Right now I’m at the end of my second year, which requires an internship.

To be fair I wasn’t really looking forward to doing an internship as I can be pretty scatter-minded and didn’t know what I wanted to do at all. I knew I liked social media, marketing and writing. However, most internships for those skills were very focused on one aspect and I didn’t want that kind of commitment. What if I didn’t like social media or writing and then I would be stuck doing that for 3 months! Or what if I didn’t like the company and I got a horrible boss?

Luckily I found out about Spotted by Locals, and instantly liked the concept and their philosophy. I love traveling (whenever I have the money), and discovering and learning about new cultures (whether it is through traveling or a chat with a local). When I got the internship I was absolutely thrilled. I think the internship here is great because it’s so diverse which is why it stood out to me in the first place. As someone who wasn’t sure what my interests really were, it was great to have some room to do both social media and also pitch ideas for and write my own articles

I myself am very active on social media, and love to think about what would work best, and why. Which is why I think this internship was so interesting to me. And let me tell you, I didn’t know anything before I started. Seeing the world of analytics behind media is very interesting (and complex from time to time), but so useful when working in the field. I learned way more about media and the thought process behind it than I thought I could to be honest!

What I liked most about the internship was the combination of creative freedom (which I find to be quite scary sometimes) and structured tasks. I really enjoyed thinking of subjects and pitching articles and projects. Also because I wrote some articles about Rotterdam and I am hopelessly in love with the city.

The biggest hurdle for me was the fact that there is no office and no coworkers who constantly see and check what you’re doing. It’s just you and your laptop sometimes. It really can be hard to stay focused and disciplined, especially when it’s nice and sunny out. But luckily I live in the Netherlands and two days of sun always goes paired with some type of storm. And I learned that you can train discipline and getting all your work done in time is so incredibly rewarding. I think exactly because this internship is quite free in how you fill in your time it has taught me to plan better and also be more independent.

I really enjoyed my time at Spotted by Locals as an intern and will miss it. The guidance by Bart really helped me, even though I wasn’t familiar with any programmes at the beginning I could still work by myself by the end of the internship. For me, the biggest takeaways were improving my skills in social media and writing and learning to plan and sticking to that plan! For anyone with similar interests looking for a challenge, I highly recommend doing an internship here!

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