What I learned as an intern at Edenspiekermann

I’m Peter, Design student — and I was an intern at Edenspiekermann Berlin for the last 4 months. I’m heading back to university in January to write my bachelor thesis which is why I decided to write down a summary of what happened. [This is of course absolutely unrelated to the fact of Edenspiekermann looking for new interns at the moment.]

So, here we go!

I’m planning to conclude this post up with some positive things so let me start with something negative: 3 things I didn’t learn or wasn’t allowed to do during my internship.

1. Working late

They said it was an important part of that whole design agency world to work late, do extra hours and awesome stuff like that. Reality was quite disappointing: I usually left the office around 6:30 and pretty much every time I tried to do that extra hour thing, someone told me to call it a day already and leave. Pretty lame!

2. No money for interns

They said it was a common thing for interns to get no or very little money for their work and I was looking forward to trying to survive under these circumstances — that’s a thrilling challenge after all, right? Again, my expectations were heavily disappointed: Not only did they pay me, they paid double the amount usual in Berlin. Boooring! 

3. Making copies and other amazingly simple tasks

I always had this passion for big printers and copiers so you can imagine my excitement when I first entered the printer room at Edenspiekermann and saw this majestic, shining Xerox machine. Sadly, I didn’t copy a single page of paper in the past 4 months and all the tasks given to me were way more complex than I hoped for. 

Well, enough of this semi-funny stuff: Here are some things I actually can take away from my internship!

1. Being an intern doesn’t have to feel like being one.

Starting with day one, I was completely integrated into the processes of the project I worked on (unfortunately top secret stuff, but this will be awesome!). At every moment I had the feeling to be an important and respected part of my team, I was part of every meeting with our client from the beginning. 

Sketching out ideas Analogue meets digital

2. Awesome people make awesome work. 

I already experienced this in some university projects and it’s pretty much a no-brainer after all, but my internship once again showed me how important it is to have awesome, inspiring people around you. Not only is everyone an absolute expert in his area of work here at Edenspiekermann, but everyone is also super friendly and helpful. It’s so much more productive to work in such an atmosphere!

3. Heading towards digital was totally the right decision

This is more of a personal thing, but I am super happy that I took that decision to dive into the digital part of design some months ago. This is not supposed to sound disrespectful against all other design disciplines, but I have the impression that apps and websites (and all the things that have yet to be invented) are the place where the most exciting things will happen in the next months and years. I can only encourage every design student not to be afraid of digital even though it might not have been that big of a part of your studies so far.

There are hundreds of other things I learned, actually I feel like I learned more in these 4 months than in the 3.5 years of studies, but it would lead too far to write them all down. Instead I want to use these last lines to thank everyone at Edenspiekermann for the great time I had here – especially my team consisting of @christianhanke, @mguth, @harryfk, @julianpanzer, @plantchuck and our wonderful scrum master @baraknor. This was awesome guys, see you soon! :)

Daily scrum meeting The Edenspiekermann Berlin office

Side note: Edenspiekermann is always looking for interns, specifically to work on our digital projects – take a look at the jobs page.