My Internship Experience at Health At Home
Written by Prim Budsaratragoon, as part of NIA’s Founder Apprentice Program
As most of you know, summer is the time where undergraduate students are looking for job opportunities and internships. And, I was lucky enough to spent the summer of 2020 at Health At Home, a healthcare startup in Thailand.
A lot of you may have heard before that the world is entering aging society. Many countries around the world are facing a growing rate of aging citizens due to the low birth rate and longer life expectancy. According to Global Age Index, Thailand is ranked among the top 3 for most rapid growing number of aging population in Asia. Knowing these facts, it has come to my interest to learn more about the business in healthcare field.
Health At Home is a company that provides a platform to connect professional caregivers with homeowners. The company focuses on creating a wholehearted experience for their customers, not just matching customers and caregivers.
At Health At Home, I work in the Business Development team, and my project throughout the internship program is to take care of the company new product called “Health At Home Academy.”
First and Foremost, I must say that I am not a business student, so there’s a steep learning curve. There’s a lot of business skills I need to learn throughout the internship. Most of the learning comes from real life situation, which makes the learning process much faster.
During my first few weeks, I tried my best to better my understanding of the company and its products, while also studying different business plan models. Being able to learn new concepts and applying the knowledge at the same time taught me to learn fast and to be flexible.
Working at Health At Home is more than just finishing your own task. Everyday, when I arrived in the morning, my mentor, P’Air, would catch up with me on what I’m doing and she would also update me on her own tasks. As an intern, I was invited to join most of the meetings in the company (if it’s not confidential,) which I think is very useful because I get to learn from different sectors in the company.
The working culture at Health At Home can be described as one of the best experience I ever had interning in Thailand (for real).
The CEO of the company, P’Tum, always talks about 3 key concepts: agility, growth mindset and empathy, and to be totally honest, I can see these qualities in most of the people I interacted with in the company. Everyone is very friendly and they are very flexible with everything they are doing. One of the lessons I learned while interning is that it’s ok to fail in whatever you are doing because the most important thing is how you get up and learn from the failed experience. I know that this is a cliche concepts that every scholars talk about, but working in a startup company, I realized how important it is to have growth mindset.
Coming to work everyday feels like a new adventure to me. I kept thinking on what kind of task will be assigned to me or sometime what kind of food I’ll be exploring with my team for lunch!
There was much to take away from this internship program, and I’m sure the learning will forever stays with me.
Here’s a summary of what I think would be useful for those of you who are deciding on internship.
- Don’t reject an opportunity just because it’s not your top choice
I think it’s quite common for us, college students, to think that we only want to do what is “useful” for our career path, so it is pretty easy for us to “say no” to an opportunity just because it might not takes us directly to our end goal. However, you should remember that every opportunity comes with a lesson. You should give it a try and maybe you will learn something new!
2. Play the “Give and Take” game
As an intern, our goal is to learn the most we can about the startup world. However, it is not a fair play if we’re only taking resources from them. You should always think about how you are giving back to the company. Are you being useful to the company, or are you actively working for them?
3. Ask for feedback
We all love to hear compliments from others, however, compliment does not make us grow as a person. Receiving feedbacks both on your works and work ethics help you understand yourself better. It is a shortcut way to fix your gaps and bad habits. It’s an easy thing to say, but hard to take into action.
Special Thanks:
I would like to say thank you to P’Tum an P’Air for being the best mentors ever! You guys taught me so much and I look up to your work ethics. I’m also thankful of everyone at the office for creating such a welcome environment, specifically P’Paeng and P’Nan, who took me on a food run every afternoon.
Lastly, I would like to thank the Founder Apprentice Program for such an amazing internship opportunity that I would never forget.
