Why Design Prodigy? | Having a meaningful internship
Currently, at the point of writing, I am interning at Design Prodigy, a digital marketing firm in Singapore.
About Me
To provide some background information on me, I am an Year 2 undergraduate at NTU, studying business and computing. I am both a software developer, and a data analyst. I join hackathons and data science competitions frequently. To find out more about the competitions I joined, click here to read more.
You might wonder, why am I interning in a digital marketing firm when I am in the programming and data science field? Or more precisely, what is so special about Design Prodigy that enticed me to intern at their company?
Interview Stage
At the point of interview of the internship, I am given the impression that I would be working with other interns to solve challenges that have no solutions yet. They call it the "ungoogleable" challenge. It begins with you having no experience of marketing at all, but you are required to solve big issues that many marketers out there want to solve, but there isn't a known solution to it.
Sounds absurd, isn't it? Instead of finding experts in the field to resolve it, they are finding interns to do it. And expects someone with no experience at all to churn out a solution for them. Surprisingly, they have been doing this internship programme for some years already, and each batch of interns never fails to amuse them with new solutions. The founder, Marc Goh strongly believed in the idea of having knowledge workers, namely polymaths - those who are not constrained to their own field of thinking, those who can adapt and are open to new perspectives to existing problems. At that moment, I knew that this is definitely not the typical internship one would expect.
It then struck me.
Do I want to just have simply as a typical normal internship (and accept other internship offers)?
or
Do I want to accept this insane challenge (although how tiresome it might become)? "
As you already knew, I picked the latter. And now I am currently 8 weeks into my internship programme. Very excited to watch the self-crafted solution developed by other interns and I being put to the test for real-world execution.
Lastly, maybe some words to those who are looking for internship:
Are you game for a more difficult, yet meaningful internship?
Stay tuned for my next article on actual work done during my internship
More information for internship seekers
Video on Polymaths (Made by the interns): https://www.dp.sg/the-future-belongs-to-polymaths/
Apply for internship here: https://www.dp.sg/internship/