Flóra Bagyinka: My CEMS internship at Arla

Thanks to CEMS, I had the chance to spend the summer of 2016  in Denmark at Arla, a global dairy company (they produce incredibly delicious cheese and yoghurt!). We were chosen with 8 other students from around Europe as members of the Arla Summer Internship Program, a prestigious talent program for master students.

We were all assigned to a project which we had to execute throughout our 10 week long internship. The company culture was amazing, we were treated as equals by even the top managers, the program managers took great care of us with several development sessions and we could take on a lot of responsibility and got exciting and challenging tasks. I worked in the global Learning&Development department on a process standardization project, which gave me a lot of knowledge on how a company manages employee development across the whole world. It really was a great professional experience.

However, the summer wasn ’t only about work: me and the other interns lived very close to each other (in very cool apartments with a view on the sea provided by the company…) so we could easily spend a lot of time together. It was sort of like a mini exchange semester for me. We cooked dinners, went cycling, sunbathed on the beach (on those rare occasions when it wasn’t 18 degrees), danced together at the Beyoncé concert in Copenhagen, discovered the city of Aarhus together and shared a lot of other memorable moments.

Overall, I am very grateful for having had the possibility to do this internship which would have been a lot more difficult without CEMS!