We’ve had the pleasure of welcoming university student Miguel to our office over the past six months. As a small business, we’re not quite as prepared or as slick as the larger local companies offering internships, so we’re always a little apprehensive about the experience we provide. Thankfully, Miguel has kindly offered to share his thoughts on his time working with us.
A semester at Your Marketing Team
Most of the placement students on my course at the University of Surrey applied somewhere large. Big agencies, graduate schemes with large cohorts, hundreds of other graduates around them. I chose somewhere much smaller on purpose. A lot of my university work had been focused on SMEs, and I wanted to actually work inside one, not just study them. I am super glad I did.
You get to know the people you work with
Most people were in the office on the days I was in. Some of that time was at the desk, and part of it was through socials: pottery class, dinners, an England game. None of it was in the job description. It’s still the first thing I’d mention. There is something about spending a day working with someone and then sitting next to them at a pub that makes the working relationship feel a lot more natural. I noticed that pretty early on, and it made asking questions a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.
The responsibility arrives quickly
YMT knew what I could do within a month or two. That’s roughly how long it took before I was given jobs to run rather than tasks to help with.
For example, research tasks, SEO work across over sixty pages of two client websites, and blog writing, across a client list that ran from architects and interior designers to industrial manufacturers. In most cases, what I produced was what went out. The standard at YMT was consistently high, and I worked to meet it every time.
That also meant the work was real work. If something was late or wrong, it was late or wrong for a client, not for a coursework deadline. There were only nine of us, and the workload doesn’t scale down to suit that.
The thing I was good at was being handed something and figuring out the most efficient way to achieve the result by using AI. I could take a task nobody had attempted to use AI for before, work out how to do it with the tools, and come back with it ready for evaluation from a human perspective. Nerve-wracking at first, and then gradually normal. I think that is the best way to learn anything.
It did go wrong once. I took on a task, gave a confident deadline, and missed it. It taught me more about how to scope a job than any of the work that went right.
Most of this came down to the size of the team
There were nine of us, and most of us were in the office most of the time. Sharing an office is what made the socials feel like the team rather than an exercise, and it meant that when I had a question, the person who could answer it was sitting a few feet away rather than in another building or on the end of an email. There was always someone happy to answer it, and I got into the habit of asking. The same thing showed in how they worked with clients. They knew them properly, and the relationships have lasted because of it.
I picked up things as I went, and once I had them, I just got on with it.
This was my first proper office job. I came in curious about how a business is run, which is most of what my degree is about, and I’m finishing having been part of one. Things I had only read about in lecture halls and seminar rooms were suddenly happening around me. I understand marketing a lot better than I did before, and that’s down to what YMT equipped me with during my time here. It has been a brilliant placement semester, and I am very proud of what I got out of it.