Intern story: Marketing and Events Assistant at VR Bound Ltd, currently AIXR

• Internship Organisation: VR Bound Ltd, currently AIXR
• Internship Role: Marketing and Events Assistant
• Length of Internship: 3 months

After graduating I found the job market was relatively difficult to navigate. I had gained a huge amount of transferable skills from my English Literature degree and my goal after graduation was always to get involved in the marketing industry, but without any formal education in the subject, I knew that an internship was the best possible way to learn the trade. The internship opportunity at VR Bound, which predominantly concerned working on marketing and event management for the VR Awards, offered the perfect opportunity to both learn the fundamental skills required for a career in marketing and work in the technology sector.

My internship was very fast-paced in terms of learning lots of information about the virtual reality industry in a relatively short space of time. Three days into the job I was sent to VRLO, which is one of the county’s biggest VR networking events and hosted at the Microsoft Reactor, where I became familiar with many of the big industry players like Google, Facebook and HTC. That was an example of being thrown into the deep end but the experience helped me build up my confidence and I gained a number of useful contacts. Over the course of my internship, I improved my copywriting and communication skills, gained a comprehensive knowledge of SEO, and learned about account management and sponsorship sourcing. In general, I really valued becoming familiar with working in a B2B environment. I’ve been at VR Bound for nearly a year now, in that time we’ve undergone a rebrand and launched an international trade body for the immersive industries: The Academy of International Extended Reality or AIXR.

It’s been an incredible year and I cannot thank Essex Interns enough for providing the opportunity, my internship has provided me with a platform to further my marketing career and I would definitely recommend the Essex interns programme to all undergraduates. The period after graduation can be daunting and the job market can be brutal, internships offer the perfect opportunity to learn a trade and start your career. For me, the technology sector is notoriously difficult to get into so to find an internship in the centre of Colchester that revolved around virtual reality was an unbelievable stroke of luck. I didn’t have a negative opinion of internships going in but I think you should really consider moving past negative preconceived notions of internships and researching and understanding exactly the valuable skills you stand to gain from getting involved.