My First Internship with an NGO

Hi! My name is Mia, and I have almost finished my remote mandate with LDMPCU in Nepal as a marketing officer. Unfortunately, we still cannot travel to Nepal due to the restrictions so we have do the mandate in person, but the technology allows us to finish most of the work online. In the past three months, I realized how working at an NGO could be so different from working at normal business firms.

Before this mandate, I also completed two other internships in the marketing and public relations industries and gained lots of professional knowledge in these two fields. Due to the pandemic, we also had to work remotely sometimes, but differently, everyone was in the same time zone. The time in Nepal is 10 hours ahead of us in Canada, and now longer because of the daylight savings, so many of our meetings are in the early mornings (such as 6 a.m.). Therefore, I had to arrange my own working schedule to manage my tasks.

But I really, really love what I have done so far because they allowed me to combine both my academic interest and professional experiences and actually apply such knowledge. For example, I had a chance to finish a marketing strategy plan individually, which I wouldn’t even imagine in my two previous internships. I also learned so many new skills like operating a website, designing a brochure, and opening up a business Facebook account. Some of them were successful, and some of them (the business Facebook account) were honestly a failure. I was unable to complete the verification steps as a remote volunteer since it requires so many documents and materials. But ultimately, these experiences all taught me to realize my true skill sets and my limitations.

The past three months have been a great and irreplaceable experience in my life and made me reaffirm that I still wish to work at an NGO after I finish my studies. I hope one day I can travel to Nepal and meet all these people in person, and if possible, I hope to see how my work have made a change in the local community.