My international internship experience at Netherlands helped me make tough decisions, says Sunishka Gupta

On September 29, 2019, around 10 pm I had my flight to Amsterdam, Netherlands along with my six friends. I was in an enfeebled state as after going inside the airport end to end processes that were to be handled by us for a duration of two months. From managing apartment hunt to learning new things at work, at every step it inherently made me stronger and be more patient. It shaped my personality and helped me make tough decisions without any influences.

Initially, we had seven days Networking Events with Ingenious Faces. We visited many corporate offices such as Adyen, Booking.com. Uber, Growth Tribe, etc. We also attended some speaker sessions which were given by entrepreneurs and professors at the University. Along with these intuitive sessions, our design thinking challenge was also conducted on the last day where a business model of a Dutch Startup was to be presented by us in front of our organisers and Dutch entrepreneurs. During this week we also had a fun activity where we learned more about Dutch culture, lifestyle and education system.

After this week, my internship started in a company XO Sight BV which was located in Delft, Netherlands as a Marketing Strategist. The company was about warehouse and inventory management with autonomous drone technology. My main responsibilities were designing flyers and banners for conferences that were held in late October and starting of November. My first conference was Sprint Robotics, Rotterdam where we had our product display for two days. I went there as an exhibitor and had to explain about our product and business model to the attendees and other businesses. It was an eye-opening event as it involved innovative technology demonstrations by other start-up companies too. In the month of November, our company went to Lisbon for Web Summit, the largest tech event in the world. It was four days extensive event and we had our product display for only one day in the Alpha group. The summit also involved speaker sessions by corporate leaders, technologists, C- level executives which were part of the companies such as Unilever, H&M, Amazon, Apple, etc. My main aim was to get as many people to visit our booth which was part of logistics and FMCG companies. I had set up a few of the meetings in the meeting room and eventually had a decent conversion rate. The networking at the Summit helped the business significantly and we made many connections for future prospects.

My experience also involved visiting other neighbouring countries and living with a host family in Hague, Netherlands. These above experiences helped in broadening my horizon and increase knowledge in terms of technology and inter-cultural values.

About the author:

Sunishka Gupta is a second-year PGDM Student at Athena School of Management in Mumbai. She is pursuing her specialisation in Marketing. Sunishka completed her graduation from the prestigious Hansraj College affiliated to Delhi University. 

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha