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Mentorship July 6, 2018
Hard skills are important, but soft skills are essential.
When you think of an internship people think of doing errands for your boss. At ENTITY, the experience was totally different. The program ran for seven weeks and made sure that you didn’t just get experience but learned something. It brought in panelists from different industries who taught classes on design, networking and journalism while also giving us insight into their work. We learned how to design in Adobe Cloud, write with SEO in mind and the basics of marketing.
I found that ENTITY was watching out for its interns to make them more marketable. Besides technical skills though, I learned three useful soft skills that many schools and universities don’t teach: communication, social skills and teamwork.
The ENTITY mentorship showed us how to communicate by holding marketing classes and assigning us various projects. A lot of them drove home the idea that communication is not only a useful skill to have, but it’s essential.
In order to work at a publication, you need to understand how to listen, read and write. I loved working on my communication skills and will continue to practice once I return home.
The ENTITY SEO mentorship was not only about writing articles and learning new hard skills but about getting to know your co-workers. There were 50 interns from all over with different types of majors and backgrounds, so you learn to work on your social skills. Some are better writers and some are better designers. Everybody has different strengths, which made the program fun and eye-opening.
It’s also just a good way to practice social skills since you need to step outside your comfort zone. These social skills not only showed me how to be more confident but it helped me to build relationships with people I would never have met before.
With so many people in the program, we had to be divided into groups. Mine was called “The Pride” and we were led by our mentors Chloe and Haoran. We had constant meetings, which helped us learn how to work as a team. Talking to each other, we learned about our strengths and weaknesses.
For example, we had one project where we had to rebrand the Pandora jewelry brand. As a team, we decided everything from who was in charge of drawing to who would be presenting. ENTITY showed us how to work as a team and not a group. Groups work on individual efforts but in a team, everybody is committed to the same goal.
ENTITY taught me that hard skills and technical knowledge are important but being a decent person in a workplace who knows how to work as a team and can build relationships is the most important of all. I’ll never forget my experiences here.
