On 29th September, 2019, around 10pm I had my flight to Amsterdam, Netherlands along with nine classmates. I was tired as after going inside the airport end to end processes were to be handled by us for duration of 2 months. From managing apartment hunt to learning new things at work, at every step it inherently made me stronger and be more patient. It shaped my personality and helped me make tough decisions without any influences.
Initially, we had 7- days Immersion & Networking Event. We visited many corporate offices like Adyen, Booking.com. Uber, Growth Tribe etc. We also attended some speaker sessions which were given by entrepreneurs and professors in the University. Along with these intuitive sessions, our design thinking challenge was also conducted on the last day where a business model of a Dutch Start up was to be presented by us in front of our organisers and Dutch entrepreneurs. During this week we also had a fun activity where we learned more about Dutch culture, lifestyle and their education system.
After this week, my internship started in a company XO Sight BV which was located in Delft, Netherlands as a Marketing Strategist. The company was about warehouse and inventory management with an autonomous drone technology. My main responsibilities were designing flyers and banners for conferences that were held in late October and starting of November. My first conference was Sprint Robotics, Rotterdam where we had our product display for 2 days. I went there as an exhibitor and had to explain about our product and business model to the attendees and other businesses. It was an eye opening event as it involved innovative technology demonstration by other start-up companies too.
In the month of November, our company went to Lisbon for Web Summit, the largest tech event in the world. It was 4 days extensive event and we had our product display for only one day in the Alpha group. The summit also involved speaker sessions by corporate leaders, technologists, C- level executives which were part of the companies like Unilever, H&M, Amazon, Apple etc. My main aim was to get as many people visit our booth which were part of logistics and FMCG companies. I had set up few of the meetings in the meeting room and eventually had a decent conversion rate. The networking at the Summit helped the business significantly and we made many connections for future prospects.
My experience also involved visiting other neighbouring countries and living with a host family in Hague, Netherlands. These above experiences helped in broadening my horizon and increase knowledge in terms of technology and inter-cultural values. Thanks to Athena for the chance to experience working internationally and that too in the Netherlands!