The Internship

This is soooo overdue, what with the moving into hall, the walking all over London, and the late nights listening to others party = where got time to blog. But before I talk about our road trip and moving to London and everything else, I still gotta talk about The Internship.

I have been very fortunate to land the internship with RR. It's a well-known company (even if many people still associate it with the cars), but I think I’ve gained so much more than just a significant name to put in my resume from my time in Derby. So many things - where to start? I’m gonna kope the template from Carina’s blog and use it here, so go over and read her experiences as well!

Socializing 

Learning more about them
"I think you did incredibly well in a very strange environment"

Being a foreigner (not a tourist) was a whole new experience for me. In the beginning, getting used to their culture meant realizing the differences in behaviours and actions, and then emulating them. Sometimes, it's simple e.g. the British don't leave their teaspoons in their coffee/tea mugs and during a meeting, I quickly saw that my kopitiam style was the odd one out. Other differences run deeper, and it is important sometimes to conform. One good e.g. is that they take recycling (as part of Health, Safety & Environment) V SERIOUSLY, and a telling-off from the cleaner is one of the milder consequences of non-conformance.

There is no need to become a fake ang moh (for Asians), but learning their culture is a must, and it's interesting too! I had fun asking and learning stuff from my supervisor. Sometimes it feels (from the amount of things I don't know), like I'm five again, and asking all those random questions out of curiosity. These are conversation topics to avoid awkward silence anyway, and I really wanted to know how come pubs could run out of food by "dinner" at 6pm. "Dinner" doesn't always refer to the evening meal here btw, just take note. Many names of things and places are not pronounced phonetically either, like we learnt in school (go look up how Greenwich is pronounced - it's not what you think!!!), so listening helps!

Making friends

There’s a stark difference in work culture as compared to SG that makes this possible. Most of the time back home, you don’t feel the same approachability with superiors even if they’re kind to you. There's always a sort of divide even between colleagues of the same level. Just an e.g., I'm not too sure I'd feel comfortable playing badminton with any direct superior in SG. Things are more chill here (relative to what we're used to), which is good for making friends! Even though it's mostly the young people in the office that we hung out with outside of work, doing what young people do, we do interact with older colleagues as well. And now even though we've left, there will always be this magic thing called FB.

Getting involved in peoples’ lives

Sounds like learning to become a kaypo, but I don’t mean it that way. I’ve posted some snippets on what we’ve been up to outside of work before, and (besides the weekend trips) most of these have been because of invitations and initiations by colleagues. Or sometimes by us actually. The point is, when you're an intern in a foreign country, you should NOT get caught up in work alone, and simply aim to be intern of the year or smth. Working hard will earn you recognition, but the best experiences come from personal interactions with the people there, your supervisors and colleagues.

I've been rapper dancing, tried church bell-ringing, and seen apple trees for the first time (along with many many other plants you won't find in sunny Singapore). This is so much more than I could've learnt from a desk and this all comes because others have let us into their lives, and in the process made our lives colourful.

Telling them more about us
I love it when conversations about culture are two-way streets, coz it's always awesome when someone is interested in learning more about the tiny island I call home. 

[They may not like salted-egg yolk or durian sweets (kinda expected lol), but being game enough to try (multiple times just to be sure) is good enough!]

Work

Google - My Best Friend

Couldn't do without Google, esp since I had to learn Excel VBA from scratch i.e. office internet down = cannot do work. My work included creating a sort of interface in Excel and obviously, there was the need to make sure people use it correctly. This means think of a solution, Google and copy code from help forums and hope it works. About 80% of the time it didn’t, which was damn irritating. But eventually, I went from not knowing how to read whatever I was copying to writing bits of my own code. Achievement unlocked!

In other, less hectic times, Google maps was useful for planning weekend trips ;) 

Freedom

I got plenty of this at work as far as I was concerned, and not (not always at least) because my sup was too busy to care about me. It's nice to not have to have someone check on you at every set interval or have to constantly report your progress, esp when progress is erratic. It takes a lot of pressure off and it's great to know that I'm trusted to deliver, which motivates me to keep up my standards. Win-win situation right? Which leads me to my next point. 

Tidbits for the future
Little thoughts and experiences don't count for much officially, but I rmb those well. Having met many different situations and interacted with people from all over the place due to my super-broad scope, I have seen quite a lot of things for an intern. I have seen positions which I can see my future self in, or see myself totally avoiding. I have seen behaviours to emulate, and also to abstain from. I have been thrown faaaaar outside my comfort zone, but could always come back to my team for guidance, a team I was comfortable with, and which most importantly, treated me as one of them.

I think when I graduate, all these experiences will come back and count in how I treat people (interns included haha) and also the path I choose. The culture in SG is different from here, and the bosses back home work differently, so not everything I've experienced will apply. I think in relative sense, working in SG will always feel more restricted and rigid, simply because Asians are like that. Whatever the case, these are memories to be treasured.

Level up!
What happens when your supervisor goes away on two weeks of holiday (extremely common here) and you have to cover some of his duties? And this happens over a crucial period and involves many stakeholders. AND you're still kind of wet behind the ears, still in need of guidance. Steel yourself and move forward.

 
I rmb remarking to J smth like "I really hope I survive the next two weeks". Turns out I didn't just survive, but went on to have some of the most enjoyable and fruitful days in my term. I'm timid by nature and, I'm not sure if this is obvious, but it's smth I have to consciously counter. In those two weeks esp, I had to 敢敢来 a lot, so that I could support rather than burden my team. Struggle is a good thing (in occasional doses) because that's one of the fastest ways to learn. In the end, I think I'm simply not so scared anymore. Which is why if I had any level up experience, it's this. :)

Life

Speaking a language that we know no one else in the office understands

Yes, Mandarin. Nice to embrace our roots in a foreign place by openly commenting on random stuff happening around us. It’s kinda like talking behind someone’s back in front of them but we weren’t being rude, I promise! xD Just little comments on what others are having for lunch that kind, for our own entertainment purposes hahaha. It's lucky that we came here where everyone speaks English and we didn't have to grapple with our problems in another language (at the beginning siao liao). And I wouldn't have known before this, but it's tiring to keep speaking proper English with a suppressed SG accent. [According to a new ang moh friend I made, Singaporeans speak in a way that "curves in weird places", which is totally true hahaha!] So among the three of us, we always had a lovely time speaking the language(s) we're used to.

Out exploring!
Frankly, there's not much to do in Derby. [Funny thing is many people tell me this, but some do get defensive when I say so. Guess we're all like that, try saying SG is boring in front of me xD] An hour's driving radius encompasses many beautiful places to visit and hence, our car was put to really good use ^^. I haven't blogged about all of these trips (either due to laziness or anti-climatic experiences), but I think you've got a gist of what we've been up to! I can never get enough of the UK countryside, and I suck at long inclined walks, but the views are ALWAYS more than worth it.

We were at the top of Mam Tor saying that our photos are starting to look repetitive. Always the same rolling greenery with the same overcast sky as a backdrop. I'm no pro photographer. I have no way of making the photos look like what I actually see, let alone capture what I actually feel. It's always just me in the same purple windbreaker. Here, my descriptive abilities fail me, and all I can say is that it's always different.

Those 15 weeks have been a blast. To my school mates, never pass up a chance to intern overseas, I think I've proven my point here. Thank you RR for having us! See you Derby, and all the places we've been, I won't be forgetting anytime soon. And thank you as well, if you've read this post till the end :)