A Day In The Life Of An Intern At Uhusiano Capital — Rabea

A typical day in the life of an intern at Uhusiano Capital is hard to describe — every day is different. But maybe it’s easiest to start at the beginning…

When I started my work with Uhusiano in June, I was still living in Cologne, Germany. So my days involved many Skype conversations with the rest of the team, as I couldn’t physically meet up with them in the office.

My first ever Skype conversation with Jay, who was the first ever intern on the Uhusiano team, comes to mind, as he had asked me to help him out with a business plan of one of our clients. Every other word Jay used in our conversation was something I had never heard of before in my life, and that was not only because English is not my first language, but rather because I didn’t have much experience in impact investing and barely any practical experience in marketing — Google quickly became my best friend.

But things are different now. Now I am one of the more “senior” interns (not really though, I am still the youngest), making me the one new interns come to with questions about these strange new words.

But going back to my actual work as an intern. It has changed a lot over the last four months, but let me take you through a typical day as an intern now:

9am — Christelle and Ruby invited me along to a meeting at 10am in the City, so I am up a little earlier than usual and preparing myself for the meeting by reading through the meeting brief one of us interns has prepared. Then I am making my way to the City.

10am — The meeting starts and I am in charge of taking meeting notes, so the whole team can be in the loop on the discussions we are about to have. In the beginning, meeting notes were a lot harder. I mean, if you have not heard of about half of the words used in the meeting before, how are you supposed to make sense of anything anyone says? Now I have gotten used to the technical language and with my research beforehand I can follow the meeting pretty well and am even able to ask questions myself.

11:30am — The meeting is finished and we are off to a nearby coffee shop to debrief. Ruby usually starts these debriefs off by asking what I have learnt during the meeting, what I found most interesting or if I had any questions. By now I usually don’t have any questions, as I did my research before the meeting, but even until today I find it tough to single out one or two things I found interesting or have learnt during the meeting.

1pm — Christelle went straight to a lunch meeting, but Ruby and I are back at the office. I usually work from the office on Wednesdays and Fridays and work remotely on all other days. Now it is time to check my emails and have a look at all the tools we use to see which tasks are most urgent and I should get done today. By now, the other interns will probably be in the office as well, so we will have a chat about the tasks at hand and if anyone needs support or advice from one of the others.

3pm — Today was a pretty regular day. So far, I have answered several emails, worked on our deal pipeline, updated the progress report and dashboard of one of our clients and written and then scheduled posts for our social media pages. Now it’s time for a quick coffee break.

3:15pm — I’m back at the office from my coffee break and I see that Ruby and Simon are in the conference room for a meeting with a potential client — I am excited to hear about it after! For now I will have to prepare for a phone call Ruby and I have scheduled later today.

4pm — The call we are about to have will be a kick-off meeting with our new client. So far I have been working on the due diligence with another intern and we have compiled a list of questions for our new client, which Ruby and I will be asking during the meeting. This is definitely one of the things I appreciate most about working for a start-up — the responsibility. Ruby and Christelle give us so many opportunities to develop our skills, something I was not used to from previous work experience.

5:30pm — The meeting is over and it went pretty well. The client was very helpful by answering all of our questions and we will now officially start our engagement! Before we get started however, I will have to revert back with the other interns that have helped prepare the due diligence and update them on what we have just discussed.

6pm — All done for today. On some days we have a lot of meetings, other days consist of a lot of work in front of a computer, but today was kind of a mix between the two. As mentioned before, as Uhusiano Capital is a start-up, work never gets boring. I have new and exciting tasks every week. One week I would go to a meeting and have to do market and investor research and prepare marketing collateral, the next week I would help plan an event and prepare concept notes.

Overall, I am very happy to be doing my internship at Uhusiano Capita, as the whole team shows a lot of support in everything you do and gives you many opportunities to improve your skills, as well as to network with a variety of companies and country officials.

About the Author

Rabea is 21 years old and originally from the Cologne Area in Germany. She currently studies Business Psychology at Cologne Business School, but will be doing a semester abroad this fall at Hertfordshire Business School.

Rabea’s work experience includes several internships in sectors ranging from education over architecture and design to finance. Before joining Uhusiano Capital she held a project management position at a civil engineering firm in Germany.