This week marks the middle of my one year internship at Narrative as a mechanics intern.
I travelled 10,000 kilometres from sunny Singapore to the capital of Scandinavia as part of an entrepreneurship programme from the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The past six months at Narrative have been super exciting. Everyday, I am surrounded by crazily talented people that I can’t believe I get to call my colleagues. In my work, I have learnt about manufacturing processes, 3d printing and the difference between 1% of colour pigments.
I have also had a lot of firsts. Together with the Narrative team, I have tasted the infamous Swedish surströmming (link to youtube video), got owned in innebandy, took a dip in the freezing lake, got fat on Fat Tuesday, celebrated a Chinese New Year fika and hacked our hearts off.
In September, I will run Tjejmilen with the Narrative girls and mind you, I never run.
We are creating moments that matter, together.
More importantly,I have realised that the people here don’t drag their feet to office. Narrative highly values the welfare and happiness of its employees. We’re given the independence to work anywhere and any time, which is something you rarely hear of in Asia (almost never). This in turn makes the employees intrinsically motivated to want to do their best to contribute back to the company and what you get is a bunch of passionate people working their butts off to create the best product possible.
As interns are at the bottom of the food chain, I have been locked inside an IKEA cupboard, had my workspace relocated into the phone booth and got trash thrown into my bicycle basket. It was all good fun 🙂
Jokes aside, during a conversation with Martin (our CEO), he advised me to start having a CEO mindset instead of an intern mindset. Wait, did my CEO just asked me to be a CEO? This just encapsulates the amount of trust Narrative places on interns.
Looking back, the past six months have been the best in my life so far. How am I going to return to the work culture in Singapore? I won’t be able to play Counter Strike with my colleagues during office hours anymore 🙁
