Hello, hello, Emilie here with my last solo blog as a Pamoja intern.
Only about one month left and then I will have completed my one-year internship at Pamoja and will return to university for my final year. I feel that I am so settled in now and feel confident with the work I am doing that I am very sad to leave. For the past two months I have been working in HR and will stay in HR for my final month.
Since my last blog post I have joined the Social Committee! It was kind of a given, because I was already quite involved in organising events as I was supporting our Office Manager. However, now I am in charge of organising events, rather than just helping out. This month I organised two events, a culture buffet and a mini golf trip. Here at Pamoja we like our food and this was the third buffet in the period of five weeks or so, but I gave it a bit of a twist by making it a culture buffet. The brief was to bring food or (non-alcoholic) drinks that relate to your culture, upbringing or favourite holiday destination. We had dishes from 18 different cultures and some regional ones from the UK.
On the same day as the buffet we also had a lunchtime visit from a lady from David Lloyd Sport Clubs. She was here to promote gym memberships and tell us more about the facilities and possibilities. There was a quiz, through which you could win some branded goodies, and a plank challenge, through which you could win a two week free membership. Well done Sandie for winning the quiz! I was pretty set on winning that two week free membership, so I planked for five minutes, thinking that was pretty good…but then my fellow intern, James B, beat my score, so to win the membership I had to plank again and beat his time. So, I did, and started my two week free membership this week!
Planking for a long time was very hard, but it would have been a lot harder if we had not had a little bit of practice. Back in March some of us here in the office started a Lent plank challenge. On day one we planked for 30 seconds and eventually planked for three minutes at the end of Lent. Getting everyone motivated to plank everyday was not always easy, but most of us completed the challenge. Here’s a little snap of us planking in the office, with the dog joining in.
On to the next event, the mini golf trip, or should I say ‘crazy golf’ as English people call it. I organised this trip for whoever from the office wanted to join and play some crazy golf. We did an 18 holes galaxy themed course on an afternoon after work. It was a lot of fun and there were some interesting techniques.
Throughout my internship I had to do multiple university assignments as part of my course and in technical terms this internship is called a “placement”. One of the assignments is giving an ‘end of placement year presentation’ for your university tutor, managers, and other relevant people. I had my presentation this week and talked about all the projects and tasks I did in each department, what I enjoyed most, what I learned, what the challenges were, etc. I had so much to talk about, so I structured my presentation around five objectives I set myself before I started my placement; my pre-placement objectives. When speaking about what I had learned and achieved I would refer to these objectives to see if I had met them. This gave some structure to, what otherwise would have been, a bunch of stories about what I did in each department. Overall, I feel the presentation went well and it was a good opportunity to reflect on how I have improved my skills, what skills I still need to develop and what I want to get out of my last month working for Pamoja before I go back to university.
So, what will I be up to in my last four weeks? A whole range of different HR tasks. I try to help out where help is needed, which means I need to be quite flexible and will have a range of different tasks each day. Most tasks will be around organising information in preparation for the move to our new HR system. I will also continue to support our Office Manager with office organisation and continue to organise office events together with the rest of the Social Committee. The next social event I will be organising is a football match in honour of the interns leaving, which will take place in the last days of our internship. It will be an opportunity for us interns to leave Pamoja on a high, say our goodbyes to everyone and get active after sitting at a desk all day! However, a football match isn’t for everyone, so I will make sure that there is also some chill & drinks alongside the pitch for the supporters.
That’s it from me, make sure you look out for next months’ final blog, where James, Josh and I will be reflecting on our year and will tell you a little about what the future holds, before we hand over the intern blog to the next Pamoja interns!
Emilie out x
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