My Internship Preparation

Internship is one of the compulsory programs for all business students to complete for their further studies in Taylor’s University. In fact, it is about 12 week’s times to enter into a particular career field in order to deepen our learning experience and enhance the richness of the industry interactions before we are qualified for an actual job.

At first, I was feeling lost of what should I do to get myself prepare for an internship. Fortunately, Taylor’s Career Services provided a lot of pre-internship preparation workshops for all business students from August 2014. With the help of the workshop, it gave me a better picture on what are the preparation procedures for getting an internship placement in the particular companies. For example, the first four workshops which held on 28^th and 29^th August 2014 was helpful in my preparation as it guided me on how to develop a proper resume and cover letter as well as prepare for interviews. Besides, the speaker also offered some advices for us on setting our first impressions for interviews, personal grooming and dressing and so on.

After attending the workshops, I start searching for the company that I want to work with. I chose the internship application under Own Placement (OP) which means I will apply the internship placement by my own. As an accounting and finance intern, there are two types of companies that I hope to engage with, including audit firm and trading company. With the aspect of audit firm, BDO is my choice to pursue career as of course it is a famous audit firm in having good performance and I also wish to work as an auditor to explore  the relevant knowledge and skills from this career field. I sent the relevant documents to their official website. Few weeks later, one of the Human Resources executive consultants made a phone call interview with me. Well, I knew that I’m not well prepared, at the ends I did not get an offer from them. Furthermore, I have tried to send the resumes and cover letters to various companies in my hometown, Sandakan, Sabah. However, most of the companies did not offer internship since they are only branch offices in the town.

While browsing through some job portals, I found a website called InternDome.com which allows students to get the right internship opportunities with various organisations by submitting the personal details and resume to the website. Company will choose and contact with the suitable candidates after looking at the interns’ profile.  As the dateline is near around, I tried to apply and complete the registration process through the website. Sooner, I have been shortlisted by a trading company, Victor Group of Companies and received an email notification to make the interview arrangement. Around mid of November, I was having my first internship interview with Victor Group of Companies. I was very nervous but I did try my best to perform well and also answer all the questions properly. Lastly, I managed to get the offer letter from them.

The first expectation of selecting this company is it can provide me with multiple experiences in both physical and mental state. I wish to have a chance of handling more challenging tasks out of those basic paper works and data entries so that it can gain more valuable working experience and widen the accounting knowledge. Besides, I know I am shy and not having good communication skill when conveying information to others. Practice makes perfect. I hope I can overcome this weakness during my internship placement as the industry is surrounded by professionals. I believe it is a unique learning opportunity for me to learn from everyone around in order to build my confidence of connecting to my first job.