Internship

During my semester in The Netherlands I got the chance to meet many great people. I met Mr Swinkels in the street by starting a conversation, 20 minutes later I found my internship. I decided very quickly to do it, it seems to me obvious that this internship by its orginality would teach me a lot and give me opportunities to improve my skills :

Mr Swinkels work as a free-lance designer, but before to present you my internship with detail, I have to present you my supervisor Mr Sil Swinkels, indeed without a good understanding of him you won't understand the atmosphere and the way of working of my internship.

First of all Mr Swinkels is a free-lance, which means independant but also a lot of responsabilities. For precision, he is an interior designer in a variaty of activities in the cultural sector, by example his clients are museums, schools or even festivals. 

During his study, he oriented himself on art, journalism, photo and of course design.

Today he is perfectly using all of them for his job.

Final point, I have to contradict what I say before about independance as a free-lance, he is working everyday with 4 others free-lance. They are working as a team first then as associate.

I  start working with him two months ago, he explained me how he was working few days before to start, this preparation allowed me to adapt quicker myself to what he was expecting from me. Now I can describe you my daily life during this internship :

I was lucky to have variable schedules, I finished class at the end of may so I was able to go in class during the morning or the afternoon and spent the rest of the day at our workplace https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=Bankstraat+27&ie=UTF-8

A spacious studio in the suburbs of Utrecht, the team was working in the center a years ago, but they decided to change for reasons like cost and space.

Now let me explain you the rythmic of the internship. As I explained before Estro Producties the company of Mr Sil Swinkels receive order for cultural event. By example during my internship we worked on decoration for the North sea jazz festival, one of the biggest jazz festival in the world which happens the 6-7-8 july 2012 in Rotterdam. We restored instrument, but we were also working about embellishment.

There are 6  build stages for every order :

We first meet the client (what I didn’t do because of my status), client start by present their needs. According to the client or the type of order, the contract can be detail directly or in most of the time they give freedom to the project. There will be 2 meeting at least before to sign a contract. For every free project or detailled project they are doing a presentation.

The negotiation end when the contract has been signed, but the way of negotiate is different from a free project to a detailled project. The client generally come with an already settled budget, but depending of what they asking  the production will cost higher or lower.

The production part of the internship always start by brainstorming and research. What material ? What tools ? how mutch time is needed ? how are they going to proceed ? etc . I started to have task from this stage.

Then the team find the material and start working, they generally handle only one order at the time but depending of the order they can take few orders in the same times.

The central production part is where the knowledge of Mr Swinkels and the other free-lance is needed, during this part I helped as assistant. I tried to adapt myself to the need in every times.

The final part is the distribution of the product, one more times, its depending on the order or  on the client, the responsability of routing will be for the designer or the client but most of the time its the clients.

During this internship I’ve got a lot of opportunities : meet very interesting people, improve my communication skills, I learn how to manage a project, handle an agenda but I also enjoy working in the design sector especially when it’s directly related to culture.I m passionate about culture and art, this internship allow me to work in both of them in the same times but also to learn a lot about work team, solving-problem or simply build a project.