Online Internship Experience - Hannah, Amitha and Huiyan - Cedar Girls

Hello! We are Hannah, Amitha and Huiyan, a group of students from Cedar Girls Secondary School, and we took part in a 12-day online internship with Make The Change during the school holidays.

We chose to join MTC for our internship programme as we were interested in learning how a social enterprise works. Coming from a school which carries out social innovation projects that heavily involve Design Thinking, we were attracted to MTC’s secondary schools learning programmes as they also involved the same process. While we were unable to physically work with MTC due to Covid-19, the online experience was still a unique and fulfilling one. With that being said, here are some of our wonderful experiences with MTC!

During the length of our internship, we assisted MTC with some of their ongoing projects such as the Instagram revamp for Design For Good’s Instagram page and a jeans movement project. This enabled us to contribute our own ideas creatively while having a more in-depth understanding of how a social enterprise works. We were also given the opportunity to attend forums and workshops which provided us with a holistic and hands-on experience!

One of the projects we undertook was to manage Design For Good’s Instagram account. We created a detailed content calendar in preparation of the 10.10 sales which included pictures and detailed descriptions of the posts. Each post was made to promote DFG’s products, purpose, and people. We were given the liberty to choose the product pictures, create our own posts for impacts and people and create captions for each post. We are glad that MTC gave us a lot of creative freedom and trust by allowing us to do the majority of the planning and posting for DFG.

Another project that we were involved in was a research proposal for a jeans movement that Xuemin, Community Development Specialist, was planning to do. This jeans movement targeted to collect preloved jeans and upcycle them into various versatile products. The jeans movement also aimed to engage single mothers with low income to help in the process of upcycling. We were in charge of researching the various background information that was needed to evaluate if the project could be implemented. We were able to create an empathy map for single mothers, research on the effects of producing and throwing jeans and read up on similar denim upcycling movements in Singapore and other countries. Thus, creating the research proposal was up our alley as it coincided with what we were taught in Cedar.

Besides these projects, MTC also gave us an opportunity to attend the Arts and Disabilities Forum jointly organised by the National Arts Council and Very Special Arts Singapore. Through the 3-day forum and workshop, we gained meaningful insights about persons with disabilities and the importance of inclusivity. The forum was indubitably an eye-opener and was an incredible experience in helping us to learn more about arts and disabilities.

Furthermore, MTC also gave us the opportunity to attend a Social Entrepreneurship Training Session, conducted by Mr Pedro, Business Development Manager. This training session helped to teach us how to initiate a social enterprise and what it takes to develop the business. We were taught about different types of social enterprises, and what effect each has on the community. We understood the importance of analysing the needs of your target group and how to approach the development of your enterprise. This experience helped to fulfil one of our goals of understanding how a social enterprise works.

We are grateful for MTC’s friendly and welcoming environment which gave us an overall pleasant experience as first-time interns. Although we were quite worried at first due to the Covid-19 situation, they were more than glad to accept us and eased any concerns we had.

In hindsight, our internship here at Make The Change has been extremely enjoyable and we are more than content with our takeaways from working with the team.