I cannot believe four weeks have gone by since I arrived in Shanghai and started my internship in this amazing city. Time has flown by, but I have kept the goal to make every moment count, to take every opportunity to learn, explore, and expand my horizons, both at my job site and as I go about my days and weekends.
Since I arrived here, I have made significant progress towards my goals. Being in China, a big one was to improve my Chinese skills, which I have done through the classes I am taking six hours per week and by pushing myself to speak Chinese every opportunity I get. It has been very rewarding to go to a store and be able to communicate using only Chinese with both parties understanding everything!
I am excited to see the Pinterst profile of the company starting to bloom. We still don’t have the traffic we hope to achieve, but Pinterest is a social media platform that takes time to yield results. I have been in charge of all of the posts in the platform, and I have worked on improving every detail, from the graphics to the descriptions. I have listened to multiple podcasts, read blogs, and looked at successful profiles to incorporate improvements in every area I can, and Ihope that in the next few months the steps that I have taken will start to yield results.
Thinking about the growth I am achieving in my internship makes me happy and gives me motivation to keep pushing myself. Since I am marketing clothing that does not particularly fit my style, coming up with ideas that will be effective for the business and suit our audience has been a challenge. One of my goals was to become more confident discussing my work with my boss, which was a challenge coming in, and in my case it comes with the added difficulty that I’m doing something way outside my comfort zone. Yet I have pushed myself to pay attention to what performs well and what does not, what it is that our audience likes and what it is that my boss likes. With feedback, I have become increasingly critical and thus confident in my work, and I can now present it and discuss about it with more confidence and pride. In so doing, I have also applied many useful skills that I learned in my marketing class at Tulane last semester (another goal!), and in so doing I have started thinking about the concepts I learned in a broader way. I know that when I go back to school I will be able to think about the ideas we discuss in a wider sense, and thus whatever I am involved in in class and on campus will be even more meaningful.
One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about my internship has been working under Evelina’s wing. She is young, driven, and fearless, and she works hard towards reaching her goals. During my time with her, she has told me about the path she took to get to where she is today. It’s a path that required her to let go of security for various periods and acquire skills she never saw herself needing. She often asks me what my own goals are and what my strategies are to reach them. She won’t accept an “I’ll figure it out as I go” as an answer: every small effort counts. And along the way, she’s told me, there comes a moment where you have to let go of security and face your fears, because only then will you give everything you can to reach your goal, because failure is not an option. As I narrow down my goals, I will for sure consider her advice while I uncover my own path. I know one of my goals is to continually advance towards my goals and help other people do the same along the way. Just like I look up to Evelina, I will work to be someone other people look up to, so that I can share what I hope will be valuable advice to others and we all continue working towards betterment and achievement.