An Internship with Boonea: "On designated mugs and not being judged"

Let's hear from Alia Slater, the 16-year-old daughter of Impact Hub Zürich member Libby O'Loghlin from Rowing Girl Productions, how she ended up doing a marketing internship with member Flurin Capaul from Boonea AG and handing out over 100 business cards in three weeks.

Work experience

This year at school, we had to do three weeks worth of work experience. We were allowed to choose the area of work ourselves, so at first I was extremely indecisive. I thought about different areas of work for a long time before a well known feeling of last minute panic hit me square in the chest and told me to find something that I actually wanted to do for three weeks. Something new or interesting, preferably both.

So as I knew that my mum had a fast growing network of interesting people from the Impact Hub in Zürich, I asked her if she could send out an email, and see if anyone would want a quite capable teenage intern for a short period of time. After getting multiple replies, I decided to work with Flurin Capaul for three weeks at his startup ‘Boonea AG’. His company measures complex enterprise relationships between large companies.

Working at Impact Hub

As I’m mainly in art classes at school I’d never done anything to do with business or marketing, so i was really new to this whole field of work. Another new thing that I’d never experienced before was working in the Hub and this whole open working space. Now there are some things that should not be in this world, like leather jumpsuits (?!) or kale (sorry Mum), but the Impact Hub is not one of those things.

The Impact Hub office Colab at Sihlquai  is the coolest workplace. I love the idea of being able to rock up, sit at a free table and just kind of do your own thing. Everyone there is extremely nice and especially friendly if you ever need anything. Of course I was a bit intimidated by everything at first and had a lot of questions along the lines of: “Wait. Is this the bathroom I can use?” ,“Are the mugs designated?” and “On a scale of 1 to a suit, how professional am I supposed to look!?”. After a while I got into the swing of things and just learned to roll with it. I learned a lot, but most importantly that no one is judging me as much as I think they are. I also learned about networking and even got to go to Swiss Startup Day (There’s a post on Boonea’s blog if anyone is interested in reading about it.)

How did I like it?

Sometimes it did get a little quiet for me, mainly because I’m used to being surrounded by my friends at school and chatting all day long, but overall it’s the coolest, most laid back place I have ever worked in. Everyone is genuinely interested in what you do and super nice. I really enjoyed meeting a variety of new people from startups or businesses and learning about what they do! I’m very grateful to have been able to work here for three weeks and to have been able to experience so many new things in such a short time.

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