After weeks of getting excited for my new internship and telling all my friends and family about it, the day was finally here! With a little nervous feeling, I got into the huge but beautiful building in The Hague. The day started with an introduction and different games to get to know each other. It was instantly clear that every person in this room was here for another reason, with another (cultural) background and study. The common thing between us was that we were all motivated to start our experience within the Oxfam Novib Academy.
The first day of the 2-day event, we got an insight into the vision and mission of Oxfam Novib, followed by meeting the, still new, director Michiel Servaes this first day. He was eager to tell us all about his own experience within Oxfam Novib and the great feeling to not be the ‘‘newest’’ face anymore. He told us that interns are important for Oxfam Novib because they have a fresh mind and insight into the academic world so welcomed us and wished us good luck with all our new experiences and our internships.
This first day was intense. It was filled with workshops by employees to tell about subjects that were interesting for us all and also, we got practical information handed. We did a treasure hunt to get to know the building and the people in it. What I recognized was that every person in that building was very approachable. They all wanted to help you and a conversation was quickly made.
The second day was a bit more relaxing in my experience. Even though everything and everyone was still new, I had the feeling that I knew them a lot better already. This day was meant for getting to know our new colleagues and our mentors, who some of us haven’t met till this day. Today was the feared pitch, which everyone was quite nervous about. Though at the end, we were all proud. Proud on ourselves, because this was something that almost all of us did outside their comfort zone, but also on each other because we got so much nice reactions from the audience and every pitch was unique in his own way. The day ended with a treasure hunt through The Hague, a city that was all new to me. With this, we got to know the direct environment of the Oxfam Novib building including the inner court and the lunchrooms and bars. We reflected on the quality of the introduction days and we were all similar in our opinion about the feeling we went our internship in with: prepared well and excited.
This post was written by Dayenne Bijsterbosch, a Spring 2019 Policy & Research Intern at the Youth Active Citizenship team. See Dayenne’s LinkedIn.
Oxfam Novib Academy 