3 Years On: Where is The Perpetual Intern now?

Wow, it's been a while!

There I was updating my Linked In profile on a Saturday afternoon, and I suddenly remembered my old blog, The Perpetual Intern, which I kept religiously at the beginning of my life in London. I decided to see if I could still log-in, and Lo and behold, I actually managed to remember my details, and was super-surprised to see that I've had almost 5,000 views over the past few years. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but still a bit of a shock! As a result and in order to provide some closure, I thought I'd put together an update on the past few years, and where The Perpetual Intern is today...

Since my internship at French Connection, I have continued to bounce around when it comes to my working life (it must be the Sagittarius in me). First of all, I spent 18 months at a consumer PR agency working with brands like John Lewis and Avon Cosmetics - in fact, you will have seen my post about the bloggers networking event with Karren Brady which was part of my work there. Although working at that agency was really, really hard (long hours, terrible management, very high pressure), it allowed me to really cut my teeth in PR, and I'm glad I stuck it out as long as I did.

Next on the list was a job in Events Management - a role which allowed me to travel to Washington DC and New York for training camps, which was bloody amazing! It was a 'daily deals' company that I worked for, and as part of a two-person team I put together consumer events which were sold online. My job in particular was to flesh out the logistics and execute these events flawlessly with a team of 12 part time staff. In this role, I worked fairly autonomously which was a huge change from being micromanaged in my last agency! It was a fab experience, which sadly came to an end after 8 months when the company closed my division and I was made redundant.

After a difficult couple of months job hunting (and a move saaarf of the river to Wimbledon) I landed a job in another consumer PR agency, this time representing a portfolio of technology clients. This was another big change for me, as I am not the most technologically literate person in the world! Still, it was good to be challenged and again, I learned a lot more about the world of PR and the complexities and challenges involved in working agency side, with big, international brands. However, after 18 months in this role I had fallen out of enthusiasm for my clients and didn't feel like I had been given the recognition I deserved. And, I had caught the travel bug.

After handing in my notice at my second agency, I packed up 5 years of stuff that I had accumulated in London and headed back to my home city of Cardiff. But I didn't stick around for long; I spent the months of September and October backpacking around Thailand and Vietnam with my boyfriend and a Lonely Planet guidebook, generally avoiding real life completely (in fact I kept a blog about it all which you can read here). This is my opportunity for a gratuitous holiday pic!

In an incredible and completely unplanned twist of fate, my time travelling actually ended up influencing my next career move. During my last week in Thailand, a temporary contract for a Media and Communications Executive at the one and only Lonely Planet appeared on my Linked In feed. Still flushed with enthusiasm from my travels, I applied, and ended up interviewing for the role over Skype just 24 hours after I landed back on UK soil. 

Well, it looks like I will be heading back to London for a little while, as I start at the end of November :) Perhaps I should change the name of this blog to The Perpetual New-Girl!