Meet Margarida, our intern from Portugal — goodbag spotlight

Have you ever heard about the employee or team spotlight? Or read something about it? In case you haven’t, employee or team spotlight means presenting the company’s employees to the outside world. Publishing their stories or something interesting about their job and life.

We decided to do something similar with the “goodbag spotlight” series, where eventually you will find the articles about all goodbag’s team members. They will be in the interview-form and consisted of 3 parts.

1. General-intro questions (which are same for all)
2. Specific questions for each team member’s job
3. Short questions with instant answers (again, same for all)

Today, we are talking with our intern, Margarida, who will share some things about her life and experience at goodbag. We will kick off with our general section i.e. some introduction questions.

Hi Margarida, could you tell us something about yourself and your role at goodbag?

Hi. My name is Margarida, and I am 21 years old. I come from a beautiful island in Portugal, called Madeira. I am an intern at goodbag in the area of marketing and sales.

How and when did you join the goodbag team?

I joined the goodbag team in March 2020, and I found out about the internship through AIESEC. I applied, did the interview, got accepted and came to do my internship in Vienna :)

What motivates you to be a part of the goodbag company?

I would say the mission. I enjoy working in an organization that tackles environmental challenges. Besides, when I decided to apply and come to do this internship, I saw the opportunity to put 2 things that I love together; Shopping + Environment :)

What are the 3 things you like the most about the goodbag’s culture?

Huh, that is a good question. I would say work ethics — a relaxed and organized way that we do our daily tasks, open communication — because you can openly communicate with everyone in the company, from CEO to developers, other interns… Lastly, I would say being innovative — when I saw the product, I was mind-blown, all the things that we do at goodbag are really cool and in a way technologically advanced.

Do you manage to learn while working and how?

Yes. The tasks require us to push our creativity to the limit, think outside of the box, create new stuff, and put a lot of effort… There are many important new things that I learned so far. For example, how to target our audience really well, how to effectively distinguish different types of influencers, create a structure to communicate with them…

Thank you, Margarida, for answering those general questions, now we will focus more on some specific questions regarding your work specifically.

So, what do you like the most about being an intern at goodbag?

One of the things that I really like is the flexibility when it comes to the tasks. I can choose what I want to focus more on, and work in that direction. Besides that, I feel that I am a part of the team. I know that many interns, unfortunately, don’t see them as a real part of the team, which is not the case with me in goodbag. Not because I have a lot of responsibility, but because I communicate a lot with everyone and somehow feel much closer.

Oh, and one more thing that I really enjoy(ed) is the office. It is green, open, has a lot of space and it is very close to my residence.

Since you also work on the ambassador program, could you tell us something more about it? How did it start? What are the plans?

The ambassador program task was given to me at the beginning of the internship. I worked from scratch. We did not have much before it. I had to structure a lot of things: application, activities, target groups for ambassadors, rewards… It is definitely something fun and it will be very interesting to see how the program will develop in future.

And by the way, if you are reading this, and think that you would be a good fit for our ambassador program, reach out to us! Maybe you could become one of our ambassadors :)

You did internships in both Portugal (your home country) and Austria (at goodbag now), how different do you find these two working environments and cultures to be?

The cultures of these two countries are definitely different. I am not saying for better or worse, just different in their own ways. Here are some examples.

In Austria, the working hours and schedules are very flexible. I was free to organize my time and days in a way I like. On the other hand, in Portugal there was less flexibility, I was able to organize my working hours, but only in certain limits. People tend to keep stricter to the scheduler there.

Another example is that In Portugal, it was kind of a social norm to have lunch breaks together with the team or to go for a drink after work. In Austria, that social part was not so emphasized, although the breaks were really flexible and nice, there were not many big or long gatherings.

And we came to our final section, where we will go through some short questions to find out more about Margarida :) So, tell us:

• Where is your favorite place to be? Beach.
• What is one thing you cannot resist? Cheese.
• Would you like to visit space once in your life? Maybe.
• If you could meet anyone, dead or alive, who would you meet? Steve Jobs.
• Do you have a favorite quote? No.
• Do you have an (office) nickname? What is it? Mar.
• What is your favorite book so far? The Diary of a Young Girl — Anne Frank.
• If you could choose one place worldwide where goodbag opens its next office, which place would that be? Madagascar.
• Who would you most like to swap places with on the team? With Christoph, our CEO.

That was our intern Margarida. If you liked the article, make sure to follow us on our social media channels. In the following weeks, we will be talking with other team members and get to know them better. Stay tuned :)

About goodbag

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