Internship Experience as a Fashion Marketing Student: Workplace Performance

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.

I have learned so many things through this internship. While going through this internship, I also need to balance my work, my university life, and other daily activities that should be done. Although it's challenging, this experience was able to give me and gain new skills to manage all of these. 

I learned that I should be more focused and be more firm in myself. At some point, I find myself too flexible with the time that I have. As a result, at that time, I struggled to manage my time and was physically and mentally exhausted to finish everything in a few days.  

Image 1: One of the barriers and limitations is setting your work timeframe. One example whereas is task that need to be done during the night outside of working hours

Besides, through this internship, I learned to set my limits and boundaries. There was a moment when I wanted to act professionally but didn’t understand that this had been out of the boundaries that I should have set. I realized that as a student, the reluctant feeling outgrows our confidence. It is hard for me to say no to things that I shouldn't have done at that time. 

Other than that, I learned that I should prioritise health over everything. Health is really important to show our maximum performance and to manage our daily routine. During the internship, it was challenging for me to maintain my health with all the activities that I had, and I learned that I couldn’t fully be present for myself. Despite the stressful situation and tired body, I managed to get through this and still managed to submit all the deadlines on time. 

As a result, there are things that I should improve from the experience that I have learned. I should improve my confidence when working with anyone. You have to be firm to yourself and others, by being expressive. For instance, when replying to an email, we have to be clear and confident through the words or sentences that we want to say to them, but still need to remember to be polite and mannered. 

On the other hand, a skill that I need to develop further is time management. This is still a challenge for me because lack of health maintenance and I still have difficulties prioritising things that I should have done in advance. However, through this experience, I learned to set longer durations or take a break in between the deadline, to give some time to rest and gain the focus back. 

To develop this skill further, I should organise my calendar or reminders to easily navigate the urgency of the deadline, and organise the time that I have to finish the tasks that I have, instead of finishing the task last minute, which doesn’t give me maximum performance on the task that I can do better. Also, avoid too many distractions on finishing the task, as the goal is to finish the deadline in a short period. Not to think too much of other things, and just do what I can do, and do difficult tasks at the end.