Adina Khan, Teach First intern and winner of the What Would You Change competition shares her reflections on week one in the office.

My first week as an intern at Teach First has flown by surprisingly fast. To think that I only started four days ago is amazing – I feel as though I’ve been here forever!

I am here on an internship because I won the What Would You Change national competition run by Teach First. I was first told about the competition by a student Ambassador who encouraged me to enter. Thinking that I had nothing to lose and that I wouldn’t win anyway, I entered and to my surprise, eventually found out that I had won. As part of the competition, I submitted a 500 word entry regarding what I would change about the education system in England; my idea was to introduce compulsory languages such as Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese and Russian from primary school onwards all the way up to the end of further education – coinciding with the fact that India, China, Brazil and Russia will become the world’s largest economies by 2050. I felt that this would allow English pupils to get a head start in today’s increasingly competitive world, whilst being competent in a language of their choice.

My week started off in the most dramatic fashion after I narrowly avoided missing my 6 o’clock train from Liverpool. After that, I attempted to not get crushed in the early-morning London rush hour whilst dragging a (very heavy) suitcase behind me. Suffice to say, when I reached the office, I was a bundle of nerves, exhaustion and excitement. 

I met Emily Moore and Laura Muir, my two co-coordinators during the internship, and I was then introduced to the project I would be working on. My task was to design, plan and create the launch for Policy First, an event taking place on the 22nd September within the bigger theme of Challenge 2012. At first, I was excited but that soon turned to panic when I realised exactly how little time I had to do everything!

During the internship, I will be working with three different departments: External Relations, the 10th Anniversary Team and the Ambassadors team, who I was placed with in my first week. My brief introduction to the team resulted in some more internal panic: how on earth was I going to be able to remember everyone’s names?!

But, several discussions, meetings, lunches and lots of laughter later, I’ve not only managed to come up with a plan for the launch but I’ve also managed to remember most people’s names.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of my internship, especially with External Relations, where I can think that I’m actually a real journalist and not a sixth form student pretending to be one. I’m also excited for the official launch where all the hard work of all the various teams will come together to showcase some amazing pieces of work.