Hi there!
My name is Marcella, I am twenty-one years old and I’m from the Netherlands.
I am currently in my third year of studying Applied Psychology at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Having traveled to South Korea before, I’ve decided that I wanted to live and work here for my studies one day.
I am majoring in consumer and society behavior and this led me to join Acopia as an intern. The variety in projects and activities appealed to me the most.
I have been an intern at Acopia for a few months now, which makes this the perfect time to reflect back on the first period of my internship. I have learned about many things including political and cultural matters during my internship this year. I got to learn about the political disagreement between Japan and Korea and what problems this causes in today’s society. Especially how it affects the youth in both Japan and Korea. I think it’s important to learn about these matters, because this isn’t something that was discussed by the youth in Europe, yet it has such an impact for many people especially in Asia.
Acopia has a few big projects that the company is working on during my internship. Acopia organizes work camps in several Asian countries, KPOP related programs and provides language education for youth in both South Korea and Japan. The organization supports voluntary work, international cooperation, and exchange between Asian countries. The main projects that Acopia busies itself with now are the KTC and Working Holiday project. I have participated in managing both the KTC and Working Holiday projects during my internship. The tasks and projects were divided between the interns during a meeting on my first working day.
My main tasks in the first weeks were recruiting participants for working holiday positions within our partners. This included field research for competitors, promotion of the programs as well as interviewing participants and keeping in touch with them. I have also promoted Acopia's programs through Instagram, creating daily posts and responding to questions from interested individuals. Both my management and communication skills have improved a lot through these projects, because of the contact with the culturally diverse team of Acopia as well as costumers and participants from the programs. I have been able to link my required university assignments to my tasks at Acopia, which made it easy to combine my studies with the company tasks. This was mainly caused by the diversity as well as opportunities and freedom to create your own tasks. This made it a great learning experience for improving my time management skills, since being in intern at Acopia meant that you have to be very self-guided and independent. You are expected to function with minimal supervision, once you know your tasks. I wanted to emphasize this, because as much as I learned during my time at Acopia, this was something that I found challenging during my internship.
In all, this internship has been a great opportunity to improve several important skills in business and communication, as well as enjoy and learn about new cultures like Korea and Japan. I got to experience the daily life in South Korea, as well as living on my own for the first time. I have celebrated holidays like New Year and made many new friends (both global and Korean/Japanese). This made it a meaningful experience for me.