Jasmin's Internship with Ambition

Ambition partnered with Career Ready to offer Jasmin, a year 12 student, a six week paid internship over the summer.  Career Ready is a UK wide charity linking employers with schools and colleges to open up the world of work to young people.  

Here's what Jasmin thought of the experience, in her own words.

The time for me to say goodbye and leave Ambition is arriving soon, unfortunately. I have found my time here among caring people in an office environment enjoyable. 

I came into Ambition hardly knowing anything about recruitment through an organisation called Career Ready who help prepare students for the world of work. My reasons for joining this program were my keen interest in media and my desire to further develop skills I may lack, gain experience within an office environment, have something to do during the holidays and make a bit of money for myself. 

However, at first I wasn’t keen about working in an office environment because I felt like it would set me back in my career path. I had held several jobs in my life, from a music journalist to an audio technician to working at a self-made record store business. An office job to me seemed pointless at first, since I want to work in music.

Expectations vs reality

Before starting at Ambition I had a lot of misconceptions about what working in an office entailed and I felt quite nervous. I was very apprehensive about having to meet new people and instigate in conversation with them because of my anxiety and fear of being judged. 

However, I have managed to sustain good work friendships within the office and everybody has been very understanding, friendly and patient with me. I have been made to feel like I am part of a family, a small collective of brilliant people and to leave the office will be quite hard. 

As for my concerns about not being able to employ the skills I would learn at Ambition into my own work in the music industry, I was very wrong because I can see myself using the skills I have adopted over the course of my internship in the future whilst in the music industry e.g. creating market research spreadsheets in excel but concerning music artists and record companies. 

What has been fun and what hasn't?

Behind the scenes of recruitment I have learnt about CV formatting which I in turn used elsewhere for friends struggling to write their CVs - it has had a 100% success rate. 

The CV writing focused upon my tolerance towards repetitive tasks as well as my Microsoft Word skills, I would say that I have improved in both considerably and this will be a skill that I will carry on in my life. 

Along with this, I developed my photography skills which is useful as I am studying Photography at A Level. One of the most fun tasks I was given at Ambition was to take everybody’s work and LinkedIn photos. The task at first was not even mine but when people found out about my A Level in Photography and how I won a photography award they entrusted me with the role of Office Photographer. 

I had to first learn about fashion photography and how to airbrush properly which had me watching multiple videos and reading articles on it in my spare time. In a sense, this has taught me the importance of further personal research in the completion of a large task. 

On the other hand, my least enjoyable task was doing market research and also writing up interview transcripts which I found quite tedious.

My most enjoyable part of my internship, however, was hanging out with the people that worked with me because I am a very sociable person when given the chance. I was invited to the office party and asked to DJ and take photos of people. This is what I enjoyed the most because I got to do things that I love, playing and listening to music, eating, talking and taking photos. 

It is the people that have made my internship worthwhile. I must admit that I won't miss the work and I don't want to work in an office again.  However, Ambition’s team are full of some of the friendliest people I have met in the work environment, up there with the infamous Boz Boorer and Ian Fortnam. I will greatly miss Ambition for this.