I was born and raised in Asia; I am getting my Bachelor in Europe; and people always say that it’s always hard to catch up with me as I am always not at home. However, no one has ever anticipated to see me taking up an intern role in Romania.
I was impressed by how open-minded Around25 was when I first pumped into the opportunity. As how my friends perceived about me, I am always travelling to different places, so that’s why I was keenly looking for a platform that appreciates my exotic inputs. I became even more eager as I was researching about Around25, seeing how a bunch of coders are willing to devote time and go into extra miles to innovate, and create solutions that solve society’s problems - best demonstrated by their efforts spent on developing Cleverwash, Ready for Startups and many more to mention.
And because of such strong evidences of enthusiasm and dedication, I gladly took the offer to work as a marketing and business development intern at Around25. Upon my arrival, I saw how the colleagues here appeared curious on me in a positive way; I saw how our CTO Cosmin and CEO Paul greeted me as if they were saying “Finally!”. I felt like I am a permanent employed worker here that I even had my own @around25.com email account. I was accepted as a genuine part of their community and have been added to their company’s Skype group, even though I might be just staying for a short period of time.
I have never worked in an office for months of time, so I didn’t really know what to expect before I started the internship. I simply expected myself to be able to at least generate some output for Around25, and contributed ideas from my limited corporate experiences. My responsibilities at Around25 were mainly divided into two parts. I first helped developing the marketing content to be used in future promotion strategies, and secondly to research, explore and evaluate possibilities for market expansion and new business development. During later weeks of my internship, I even made some first contacts with potential agencies to co-operate with in the future.
There were a few things that I especially love about this company. First thing, undoubtedly, the level of responsibility. After hearing various internship experiences from my friends, I realized that I have comparatively received more responsibilities than the others. Whilst many marketing interns are limited to market research roles, Paul trusted me enough to allow me to make a first contact with agencies to explore co-operation possibilities when we came to business development.
Second thing, the open-mindedness of the founders. As the Chinese idiom has it - only if you “put down your prejudice” can you recognize the truth. It seemed to me that our CEO Paul always has lots of ideas in his mind with regard to the future direction of Around25, but even if the picture may look flawless in his head, he welcomes our inputs and contribution, and quickly merge our ideas into his imagined picture. As how the colleagues here always emphasize - there is no hierarchy or office politics at Around25, and how our founders Paul and Cosmin interact with us best demonstrates this ideology.
Third, people at Around25 genuinely wished to cultivate potentials on interns. Companies have different purposes when they come to hiring interns, but the people here are very happy to spend time teaching you something totally new. I saw how developers took turns to teach a group of technical interns who might even came from a non-IT background. As for me, I got an option to touch in works and hear jargons that are new to me, like “SEO”, “SEM”, “SMO”, “SMM” ........
Two months of time passed in a blink, although I might not be able to experience the after-effects of my contribution here, hopefully my presence as a foreigner has changed the dynamic here in a positive way. In my culture, we believe that only people with invisible bonds in our fate can make us know each other in this big big world, I hope I am more than just an intern but instead an old friend when we all look back in the future!
Melissa Tong
Marketing Intern
