One-eared snail

I’ve always found decorated cookies dubious. They usually don’t taste as good as they look. This cookie here is my goodbye present from Gel, our supervisor for our summer internship at the beach.

Well, okay, my internship didn’t really involve frolicking and partying by the sand and sea. However, we did handle a beach resort account under the projects development team over at Ayala Land Premiere.

(I feel quite queasy about posting about my internship experience on the internet because my bosses might somehow find their way to this entry when they search for media exposure on the resort. Not that I have anything bad to say or anything, haha!)

My course doesn’t require me to undergo any on-the-job training, and I really wasn’t planning to go on one anyway. But an offer came on the first week of April, I sent in my resume, and I was in. I was a bit apprehensive at first, because I had a lot of things planned for my summer–not really official activities, but more of Self-Improvement Time. I wanted to brush up on my stagnating writing and graphic design skills, something I’ll never have time for once school starts. But then my friends, Dino and Lorenz, were telling me that it was a good opportunity that I shouldn’t just bypass. I spent a lot of time thinking it over, and in the end, I decided to give it a try (the pay was a good incentive, too!). I signed up for 100 hours, half of the time that the other intern, Jan, was required to do.

I started on April 9 and ended on April 29, clocking in around 133 hours. The highlight of the job was when we went to the beach resort, Anvaya Cove, because the place is extremely amazing. It’s different from the overrated beauty of other beaches–the water is clear and strikingly blue. The sand isn’t white, but will make you feel like you’re walking on a mattress. A very, very hot mattress, that is. They also have these native woven lounge mats under the tents, a barbecue grill, and a watersports hut all by the shore. The pool is wonderfully landscaped and meticulously designed, and there’s even a tower if you want to enjoy the view from above. Inside, there are separate air-conditioned, fully-furnished rooms: the library (books, magazines, flat-screen monitors and high speed internet), game room (Wii console, more computers hooked with the latest games), board room (board games), wine room, and lots more! It’s actually only in its initial stages of development, but pretty soon they’ll have lots more water sports facilities available, a golf course, and an adventure/hiking trail for adults and for kids, and ziplines. They’ve got a great concept and a creative and kooky project development team, so I’m sure there will really be lots more to expect from this resort.

Okay, I have NOT been brainwashed, Anvaya Cove was just really THAT beautiful. It was well worth the long travel to Morong, Bataan. Besides, we had a free ride and free food, so heck, no complaints here!

Wait. Scratch that, I do have one complaint: They didn’t tell us that we could actually go for a swim while they all dispersed to go to meetings! What could have been more frustrating than to have travelled all those hours, be there, standing and staring at the beach, feeling the sun on your shoulders, and NOT HAVING A SWIMSUIT WITH YOU?! The sparkly blue waters were playing mind games on me, and I could swear it was going, ‘Jump in… Jump in… JUMP IN!!!”, so I had to pry myself away from the sand and tell Jan that we’d better retreat to the library. Ah, yes, I used the air-con as a consolation and just contented myself with reading a Hans Christian Andersen book of short stories.

Aside from that one day out-of-town trip, the rest was all office work. Basically, we had two major taks: competition scanning, and clubhouse membership clean-up. For the first one, we pretended to be buyers and victimized lots of hopeful but gullible real estate brokers–leeched info from them, and erased them from our lives afterwards. So to any broker who ever came across a seemingly over-eager client with a barrage of questions but suddenly vanished into nothingness, my apologies. Just part of the job. The second task was mostly clerical work, the kind where I’d have to be plugged into my iPod to keep me entertained and my mind from wandering off.

So what have I learned from those 133 hours?

1) A desk job will be the cause of my early death. I’m really not up for an 8-to-5 routinary mostly cubicle-based kind of thing. It causes back pain, not to mention stress from trying not to fall asleep.

2) In the workplace, there are all kinds of people with all kinds of personalities and working styles. You WILL have to deal with them, and somehow find a middle ground with everyone.

3) It is more efficient to work with up-to-date technology (at least a Microsoft Office 2007 would be good enough, please).

4) Making presentations for school and for office are two entirely different things. In school, they teach us that less is more: the fewer the lines and more images than words on your slide, the more understandable it will be. There at Ayala, its so different: the more info there is on one slide, the better they are able to compare and see the bigger picture. I found it hard to adjust to that.

5) When you’re working, it’s so much cheaper to pack your own food because lunch at places like Tower One can leave quite a hole in your wallet.

6) Always wear or at least bring comfortable footwear. (On our first day, we walked from our building to Greenbelt, which took around 25 minutes, and I was wearing heeled pumps. The result? A grand total of five open wounds, and two enormous calluses. I am not kidding. My feet look terrible.)

7) It’s fun to pretend you’ve got millions of pesos to spare–the downside is when the brokers call and text nonstop to get you to give them your non-existent dough.

So yes, I’ve experienced how it is to work in an office, and I’d like to think that I have no regrets. There wasn’t a Eureka moment where I found the beaconing light shining down on me, with a voice in my head telling me that this is what I want to do in my life forevermore–no, definitely not, but I sure learned some things. I also met some pretty great people who treated us to a free trip to Bataan, free food, and fun times. Our bosses weren’t always around to talk to us much, but we were able to manage. I appreciate Gel, our immediate supervisor, for finding time to check up on us despite her stressful schedule and the fact that she’s also fairly new to the company.

The internship experience was a lot like eating that one-eared snail cookie. I had a 50% feeling that it wasn’t going to taste good, but tried it nonetheless. I ate half of it, then let my brother eat the other half.

It was okay, but it just wasn’t the taste I was looking for.