Proudly interning as a Panda

I joined a content writing startup, as a Business Development and Content Marketing intern, coming from an Electronics Engineering background. Strange, right? Well, I pretty much enjoyed the transition and the amount of adventure that it brought along itself. And If you’re wondering why ‘adventurous,’ I’ll tell you everything. Read on.

It’s been almost two months since I joined Whitepanda as an intern. And this has been one of the most ‘adventurous’ months of my life.

If you’re wondering why ‘adventurous,’ I’ll tell you everything. Read on.

The first week was all about trying to acquire knowledge of this industry and developing a mindset that my role demanded. I and my fellow interns read till the sun went down and the stars came out. Once I had the theoretical concepts in place, I had to step out into the practical world and solve real, complex problem statements. This is the thing about startups — the environment is so fast-paced that you jump into real-time projects at such an early stage, unlike the culture at MNCs. You make mistakes, you learn from them, you grow. In the first week itself, I had learned a lot about content, multiple tools that facilitate business, and several other tricks and tactics.

The second week onwards, I was looking out for leads, drafting emails, connecting to people, talking to them, building a resource pool to enable client service and a lot many other things (literally, many other things).

In a city like Bangalore, you can see everyone around you working. You’ll hear people talking about their workplaces very often; some might be happy while others might just talk about a million things that they dislike about their work. So, I’ll use this blog post as a medium to talk about my workplace and the experience that I’ve had at Whitepanda so far.

Last month when we went out for a team dinner, one Panda (everyone at Whitepanda is called a Panda) talked about how he reached Whitepanda and how he enjoyed moving ‘from his unstructured life to an even more unstructured workplace.’ The environment at a startup is not always as stable as that at some huge corporate giant. This uncertainty and entropy is thrilling to some people, which I believe can be generalized to everyone working at Whitepanda. There is no strict hierarchy, everyone is working on a million things at the same time and handling every challenge together as a team, as a family, and when I say ‘family,’ I mean it.

Every Panda here has a different background and has had different encounters with life. This means that everyone uses individual experiences to contribute and add value to the team. The scenes when the content delivery deadline is near are real evidence of what I just mentioned. Everyone, regardless of what their job description says, brainstorms to get through any bottleneck that arises.

This internship has become more of a constant learning process for me. Business development requires me to initiate conversations with random people, understand what they need and then pitch our concept in a way that it sounds less sales like, and more supportive. Content marketing demands developing an understanding of the pain points of our potential clients and then hitting them hard where it hurts them the most by positioning our brand as the only solution (It might sound cruel, but that’s how brands work!). It has taught me the art and importance of building a network of knowledgeable people. I would never have connected to so many people at such prestigious positions so early in life, had it not been for this internship. Apart from this, every day brings with itself a new problem statement which teaches us a new lesson by the end of the day. I’ve learned that scratching the surface of any problem does not generally help. You have to dive deep into it and thoughtfully figure out what solution might work and what might not. I am a novice in the field of business development and content marketing so I have to welcome and incorporate the feedback that comes my way into my daily working routine.

I have been offered a full-time role at Deloitte but the opportunity to experience the dynamics of work in a startup really appealed to me and I could not let it go. I wanted to understand the overall process and effort that goes into running a successful startup because as per statistics, 99% of them fail at some stage. It is so exciting to see a group of like-minded people working together in communion to achieve something great, and it is even more exciting to be one of them.

Working in a startup environment is teaching me a lot more than what I expected, and by the end of these six months, I believe that I would have learned a tonne more. Since I’m a person driven by curiosity and learning, this experiment worked out pretty well for me. So, since this is the end of the blog, I’d like to give you a piece of advice that is, never stop experimenting. You’ll learn a lot. If one thing doesn’t work out, the other will. Try everything that excites you. Believe me, you will never regret it.

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