Welcome to our first Go-Business article of the academic year 2022-2023! After long discussions, we realized that the best topic for this article would be something to help other students with their future. That is why diving into the life of Hugo Breuning was the perfect opportunity to take, an intern, student, and Active member at Asset | IB&M. Some may be asking themselves, how does he do it all? Which is what we’ll try to portray here.
Firstly, Hugo decided to study International Business Administration at Tilburg University because he was captivated by the international aspect of the program. He did consider similar Dutch bachelors, but he believed that by following an English-taught program he would have access to more opportunities abroad, which was of interest to him.
As some of you may know, in the third year of the IBA program students have to decide whether they want to go on exchange, do an internship, or follow a minor in a field of their interest. Hugo chose to do an internship as he wanted to get more practical skills and wanted to improve his skills by actually stepping into the work field.
Furthermore, his internship took place at MetrixLab in Rotterdam. A four-day-a-week internship where he was given a lot of responsibilities, even being able to lead some projects of his own for big corporations such as Talpa Radio. One might be scared to jump into the work field after being only in educational institutions but in Hugo’s opinion “the step up is not that difficult”. He mentioned that the life of an intern is very different from the university life that a student might be used to. One cannot be partying every day, you are in a professional environment, wearing formal clothes, and working 9-10 hours…but “you can manage if you want”.
We were interested in diving deeper into what the internship life looked like. Hugo brought up that the first few weeks were mainly training and working alongside other employees who were really helpful with everything.
A normal day for Hugo really varied as every day was full of different tasks for every project. He is out of the house by 6:45, at 7:00 he takes the train and by 8:15 he is at MetrixLab in Rotterdam. He normally chats with his colleagues, they talk about tasks, objectives…He then dives into his responsibilities. Sometimes he works alongside another colleague on a project, he owns the project, and the other employee double-checks that everything is going according to plan. On some other days, he needs to contact the operation teams in India, the USA, or the UK, allowing him to dive into another culture and gain loads of useful information. Overall, Hugo mentioned that he had to work with data a lot.
Another important part of Hugo’s life has been being an active member at Asset | IB&M. He was the treasurer for the consultancy days this past semester however his participation was on a lower level as he focused on his internship, but his inputs were greatly appreciated by his fellow committee members. He also tried to join as many informal activities but it ended up being less than in the past.
Moreover, how he was able to combine all of this was of great relevance. He had to follow 5 courses alongside his internship, which was an ensured challenge. This called for great organization and planning skills. He took advantage of the train rides to the internship and on his way back home to do some university work. He also had a free day, in his case Tuesdays, that he dedicated to looking over lectures, having university-related meetings, and working on projects. He mainly used summaries as he was not able to attend lectures.
We also got his insights as to how doable he believed that combining an internship, courses, and being an active member was. He brought up the fact that a normal internship was 3 days a week and his internship was 4 days a week, which made it harder for him to be on top of everything. A less demanding internship would have made combining all the aspects more doable.
For Hugo, the best part of combining an internship with IBA and Asset | IB&M is the mix of activities that you have in your life. The internship is a very formal environment and being able to combine it with more laid-back activities brought by Asset | IB&M. One of his favorites is the Monthly Drinks.
Hugo also provided us with some tips that can be really valuable for students looking into doing an internship. It is very important to start early with seeking for an internship as this will provide you with more options to choose from and you will be most likely to find something that really suits you. Ask yourself: “What do I want?”. Once you have an idea, do a deep dive into your area of interest and reach out to as many companies as possible in that field of work. Even if you are not fully sure if a company would be of interest, reach out, try it out, and in the worst-case scenario you were able to figure out that that type of position is not for you. An internship gives you so many insights as to what a work environment looks like, it's the perfect opportunity to be able to see if a future within a corporation would be best for you.