This is a guest post from Royal Holloway Business and Management student, Amy Davies, who is currently doing a marketing placement at Doddle. Amy encourages students to consider self sourcing their placement and talks about how this approach worked for her.
The hours of scrolling through job sites becomes very
tiresome and makes you feel like you need a change from the never-ending
cycling of corporate applications. With the world opening back up and many
smaller businesses looking for new opportunities, now is the perfect time to
target them for your placement year.
After several rejections from many different applications, I
decided to turn my head and get creative with my applications. I knew marketing
was the route that I wanted to go down, so I typed “marketing agencies near me”
into google and I was off. I began emailing them all explaining my situation
and that I was looking for a placement year. Many replied with the classic
response, “Sorry but we don’t know what is going to happen with the pandemic
and we can’t guarantee work come September” and others simply didn’t reply.
This direction was a dead end for me at the time, but in hindsight I think if I
had carried on, I would have succeeded.
Not wanting to dive back into the delights of Rate my
Placement or LinkedIn Jobs I decided to use what I had learnt from the power of
a good email and use my personal contacts. After networking with family and friends,
I was given the email address of the CMO of Doddle a logistics and supply chain
technology company, and it was my job to wow from there. Once again, I emailed
enquiring into the possibility of a job and the response was positive. It turns
out that the company had been thinking about introducing an internship program
and I managed to confirm their idea was a good one. After sending through my CV
and a cover letter, I was then introduced to the marketing team via Zoom and
the rest is history.
After two months now with Doddle, I can officially say that
sending that email was the best decision I have ever made. I had always thought
I would end up as a small insignificant cog in a massive machine, such as
Disney or L’Oréal, but as the only intern in a small technology company in an
industry I knew nothing about my perspective on everything has changed. I am
experiencing all different aspects of marketing as well as interacting with all
the different teams within the business and am treated more like a colleague
than an intern.
At the end of the day when it comes to gaining your
placements, I cannot stress enough that your email is your best friend. An
email is the easiest thing to send out compared to a lengthy application and
can do a whole world of good. The worst outcome is they simply don’t reply, and
that best outcome is making them realise that having interns is an option and
give you a job. All I can say is you never know until you try.
If any Royal Holloway students are interested in finding out more about how to make speculative applications, they can find a useful Careers' video: https://rhul.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=04c5e5ac-052a-4593-92b6-abf000d5dd1e
