Coming to Ireland, I wasn’t sure of what to expect from my internship at Hireland. I had been in contact with Lucy Masterson, my internship supervisor, via email over winter break and had a general idea of what my responsibilities would be, however I was still very much unsure of what my experience at Hireland would be like. After taking a few days to settle into my new home in Dublin, I was thrust into the Hireland whirlwind and have been pleasantly busy ever since.
One of the perks of being an intern at Hireland is the fact that I am the only one. In fact, I’m the only person (other than Lucy) who works solely for Hireland; the rest of Hireland is made up of an all-star lineup of professionals in marketing, IT, public relations, and other industries who have shared their talents to create a part time pro bono collective. Working alongside Lucy is more like having a partner than a boss and through my maturity and work ethic I have earned a high level of respect and trust from her.
From my very first day on the job I was learning new things and given plenty of responsibilities. Right away I was introduced to the developers and designers behind the Hireland.ie website and walked through the process of editing and updating the various pages with the end goal of transferring the task from the developers to me. Since that day, I have surprised both Lucy and myself with my ability to troubleshoot and fix minor issues that have arisen or apply changes to the site. In addition to updating the website, I am also responsible for monitoring Hireland’s web and social media analytics accounts and manually recording data to track web traffic and trends as well as our progress towards the goal of 5,000 jobs pledged by the year’s end. Through the analysis of the information collected, I have been able to make recommendations to Lucy with changes we could make to optimize Hireland’s web properties to ensure the highest level of performance. Just last week, I compared weekly website traffic patterns for the Hireland.ie website and saw that Monday was by far our busiest day and that we should engage visitors earlier in the week to reach the highest number of people, as opposed to later in the week as we had previously been doing.
My time at Hireland has not been limited to pouring over lists and graphs. I’ve met some incredible movers and shakers of the Dublin business community and tagged along on some very interesting trips. After working with Hireland for just a matter of days, I accompanied Lucy, Michael Killeen and Kingsley Aikins on a trip to the Dublin office of advertising agency Ogilvy for a promotional photo shoot. Having the opportunity to explore the beautiful interior of the Georgian mansion was rewarding enough, but having my picture featured in a nationally distributed newspaper was an absolutely surreal experience.
Though the purpose of my internship is to work hard and gain hands-on experience, it is difficult to think of my time at Hireland as work when I look forward to each day at the office. Having the opportunity to work alongside charismatic individuals like Lucy and taking on new and engaging projects each day are what remind me that I am in the right profession and how grateful I am that Champlain Dublin can offer me this experience. Seriously, how many American students can say they’ve been featured in a nationally circulated news story describing how they plan on tackling unemployment in a foreign country?
John Desmond – Marketing Major, Champlain College class of 2013