We are both masters’ students at King’s College London and, as part of our course, we were offered the opportunity to undertake an internship at a business in the environmental industry. We luckily got selected by Green Element, an environmental management consultancy based in London and Edinburgh. We started work in January 2021 but it is now May and we thought it would be nice to reflect on our internship experience at the company.
Before we started, we had a few conversations about what we were expecting. We both thought that it would just be a good way of gaining a little bit of experience in the environmental industry, which is so required at the moment – particularly in the times of COVID. But actually, we have gained so much more than we thought we would, learnt so many new things and acquired a real insight into environmental business. It’s been a fantastic experience.
Looking back, there are three main things that we have absolutely loved.
When we were applying, we were both drawn to how honest the website was and how many different resources were available, from reports and blogs to educational courses and podcasts. And now having spent over three months here, we have seen that these are not just about ticking boxes, but that every employee at GE is unified and committed to their message and ethos of sustainability and are motivating other companies to do the same. In a world where greenwashing has unfortunately become the norm, it was inspiring.
We have been super impressed by the inclusivity of Green Element. The business is run in a non-hierarchical, modern way where everyone is empowered to voice their opinions, no matter if they are a new hire or are a long–standing employee. This was made so clear to us from the very welcome we got when we started working all the way back in January. It must have been hard to welcome and support two people who were only working one day a week and the consultants had never met in person. But every single person was so lovely, helpful and supportive – a coffee morning was set up every week so that we could get to know the whole team, we were invited to meetings with clients that we were not even working on and everyone put up with our incessant, and probably sometimes silly, questioning. We really feel that we got the full experience despite everything being online because of Covid.
Before undertaking this internship both of us would have backed ourselves that we had an extensive and sound knowledge of a range of environmental problems, climate change and sustainability. But this experience has shown us that there is so much more than the purely academic perspective that we currently have and that we are only in the foothills of what there is to know! We’ve learnt about British environmental regulations (e.g. SECR), how to calculate emissions scopes (including Scope 3), benchmarking, and data analysis and research in a commercial arena.
We managed to learn all this stuff because we were given really meaningful tasks throughout the three months, opposed to the mundane tasks you often hear about interns being given! For example, we helped calculate the carbon footprint of companies ranging from a large clothing retailer, to a construction company based in Africa to a small marketing agency. In addition, we have also helped GE and their sister company, Compare Your Footprint, streamline their services by compiling a database detailing the carbon footprint of clients and non-clients for future benchmarking purposes.
Overall, for us, the main benefit of this internship has been that it has given us clarity of what we are looking for in a future job. University careers departments often push grad schemes at big companies over opportunities at smaller ones. We admit that previously we were seduced by this narrative, but this experience has proven us utterly, and completely wrong. Working at small, boutique companies can be absolutely awesome, particularly if the culture and the mission are as strong as Green Element’s. It provides the opportunity to gain so much experience by working on a large range of projects – even as an intern you are so much more than a cog in the wheel. This is lesson is something that we will definitely take on board when looking for a job in the future!