4 minute read
RESET YOUR HEALTH
Trinity Jean Pate, St Edmund Hall, Second Year Undergraduate, BA Biomedical Sciences, A mixture of both
Work Projects
The first week of the internship was an introduction to the
company and we spent time getting to understand how the
company operated. RYH aims to improve the quality of life and reduce/alleviate symptoms for people with chronic
health conditions by creating highly personalised meal
plans that improve the gut microbiome.
In the first couple of weeks, I worked on creating a presentation about the impact of the gut
microbiome in mental health which Catherine (founder of RYH) was to present to NHS
patients later in the month. This was really fun and allowed me to use some of the
knowledge from my degree (biomedical sciences) to create content which was easy to
understand for people who didn’t have a scientific background.
In the last few weeks, I was put in charge of looking for investments for the company and
helped to prepare them. I redesigned their pitch deck and their development plan
documents and also helped draft applications. In the final week I started creating a business
plan for the company and have been hired over the summer to finish creating it.
Throughout the four weeks I also made informative social media posts, created Instagram
reels of the recipes I cooked and wrote blog articles. The founder and head of marketing of
the company had daily meetings with us and we had a constant stream of communication
through WhatsApp whenever we had an update or an issue.
Daily Life
I still really enjoyed working on the
internship, despite it being remote. We
usually had a call in the morning to
establish how things were going and what
our plans were. Then throughout the
morning I would work on my main project,
either working on a presentation about mental health or working on the investment aspect
of the internship. When I had more spare time or had finished most of my main work for the
day, I would test recipes, help write blogs, or create social media posts.
The working day would usually end about 5pm and then we would have a debrief call with
the founder and marketing manager. I was then able to have the evening off and relax.
Catherine (the founder) was always available whenever we had questions and allowed us to
be extremely flexible with our time so we could work in activities outside of the internship,
such as going out for lunch, and then we could make it up later, either in the evening or at
the weekends.
Lasting Impressions
I had a really incredible time at this internship and learned so much about the business
aspect of an aspiring health care start-up. There is an enormous amount of work that goes
into organising every aspect of a start-up and I learned so much about the day-to-day
processes as well as helping the company search for investments.
I really enjoyed the business aspects, such as creating the business plan, looking for
investors and redesigning the pitch deck. The founder of the company recommended that I
consider a career in biomedical consultancy for similar start-ups which is something that
interests me a lot. I am looking to pursue future opportunities in life sciences start-ups and
investment firms. I also feel like I developed a lot of skills, including content creation,
infographic design and cooking!
Work Projects
We received a minimum amount of one
meeting a day as daily support from the
employers. They were exceedingly kind and
patient, and made sure that we were always
busy with work. Beyond this, we had a group
chat together on Whatsapp, and if there were
any questions we had, we would send through messages there and would get almost instant feedback/replies.
I did a variety of tasks: I tested recipes, took photos of recipes when recreating them, I
edited the written content of some of the website, I edited around 400 recipes on the
website, I wrote 3 blogposts, I created a presentation on microplastics that the employer
can present in the future, and also helped create a presentation on mental health for the
company. I researched potential investors and drafted applications for these. I helped
develop the pitch deck and independently edited the start-up executive summary and
created two new versions for them. I developed a new social media strategy along with
other interns and scheduled posts for the start-up social media for a week.
Daily Life
I would usually recreate one recipe, and it would be completely dependent on the task I was
doing, as this really did change on a day-to-day basis, but would work remotely for around
6-8 hours a day on whatever I was assigned. This would be completely sporadic though I
didn't set times and worked in the evenings if we had a lot of meetings during the day, or if I had a different obligations, e.g. getting vaccine/travelling from Oxford.
Lasting Impressions
I gained a lot of experience in understanding how a start-up works, and also was given the
chance to deal with both analytical and creative tasks. Since the variety of tasks were so
broad, I really got to understand a lot of different components of a start-up that I didn't
really gain from my internship last year, working for a different start up.
