Internship Experience as a Fashion Marketing Student: Networks

Finishing my bachelor's degree in Fashion Marketing has given me a lot of experience through industry placement. An industry placement is where we can experience an internship, whereas working with a company that you desire and experiencing the real work that I have imagined for this whole degree.

Building connections or networking is developed through this internship. According to my personal experience, working remotely is one of the challenges in building relationships with the people you work with. On the other hand, another difficulty in networking is not being able to maintain frequent contact and communication. 

Working remotely is challenging, as we are not able to communicate in person, but only through digital communication. However, the bright side is you may be able to get more contact from the people that you work with or another team member. This is because when communicating, the company might give different people to approach and contact which may be a benefit for us to build communication with in the future. The company that you work with may have connections with big companies that may introduce you and give you benefits. For instance, we may get further support from the team about certain information, as the people that we work with have more experience, which may help for our future development in the project that we are currently working on. 

Furthermore, another challenge in networking is to maintain the frequency of contacting or communicating with the team. This is because of the limitation of communication, such as only through email or messages. As part of the contract team member, we get to contact the team on the number or email that they give, yet it is still difficult to get an instant response, due to the busy activities that other team members have. Besides, we don’t get to know the person in depth because of communication limitations and not being able to meet face to face, which limits the interaction between each other. 

Despite the difficulties, we can have short conversations with other team members through some meetings, where we can interact and get to know other team members. Besides, we may build motivation with each other, as through the short meeting, we get to see that everyone motivates each other, as the struggle that we faced is the same, despite the poor communication interaction. 

Image 1: Using meeting as the opportunity to communicate and sharing some ideas and experience with other team member as part of introduction and know the background of each other

It is part of strengthening the relationship between us as the employees and the company, as they may have more knowledge and share with the team members and gain different perspectives within the conversation, especially when discussing the project we were working on. Furthermore, when exchanging information, we can tap into more networks to gain more ideas and knowledge through industry relations.