St Vivekanand School

INDIA

ST VIVEKANAND SCHOOL

MChem Chemistry, Third Year Undergraduate, Remote working

Work Projects

I set up a social media page and raised its profile to over 650 followers. I designed the theme of the account and made many posts to raise awareness of a wide variety of social issues in India and globally. I created 2 YouTube video series on debate and chemistry for school children in India and ran a zoom class that taught children how to debate. The supervisor met with us once a week to guide our work.

Daily Life

The internship was 5 hours per week, so I did around an hour per day consisting of a wide range of tasks like designing the website, creating content, responding to messages on social media, recording or editing a video, market research, preparing a lesson and teaching the lesson.

Lasting Impressions

I found it very interesting working for a start-up where we had so much say in what the company was going to look like. This was an interesting experience that I would not have had otherwise in a bigger, more developed company.

Augustus Brown,Keble College,Third Year Undergraduate,MMathPhys Mathematical and Theoretical Physics, Remote Working

Work Projects

The internship was originally meant to be teaching schoolchildren in India a variety of extracurricular subjects. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the internship had to move online, which meant the internship had to change significantly. The main task we were given was to create an Instagram account and to post every day. We had several different themes, all trying to raise awareness of societal problems to Indian Gen-z children. Our themes included climate change, feminism, racism, toxic masculinity, LGBTQ rights and mental health. Our posts addressed these issues both globally and how they specifically apply in India. For example, I created some posts on why plastic is bad for the environment and how toxic masculinity is present in Bollywood. We were very successful with the social media, gaining over 600 followers in a couple weeks.

The other task I was given was to create a video series, which I did on Inspirational Women in History. For this I made videos on Boudicca, the Iceni queen in Roman Britain, and Catherine de Pizan, who was the first ever feminist. We had a meeting every week to make sure everyone was clear with what our tasks were.

Daily Life

As our internship was only 5 hours a week, it was not too much of a commitment. Our main task was to control the social media, which required a post at least every day. The work was quite full on for the first week, as we were making three posts a day to jumpstart our Instagram account, but once that settled down, we were able to spend more time making the videos. So that the internship wouldn't take up too much of my time, I would try and make several posts in one afternoon, to have them ready but not post them, so that throughout the week posting on Instagram wouldn't take too much time.

I was worried that the time difference between India, where our boss was, and England would make it tricky to find times for meetings, however I found this was not a problem, as it was quite easy to find times that were good for everyone.

Lasting Impressions

I would never have considered a career in social media, and so when we found out that our internship that was meant to be teaching children in India had now changed into maintaining an Instagram account, I was a bit nervous as social media is not my area of expertise, however, I am glad that I tried it.

Our posts were on topics such as race, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and climate change, and I really enjoyed researching these issues, specifically how they apply in India.