Oriflame Summer Internship

Yesterday I had my final presentation of my Project: Product Culture in Oriflame India. I was really excited and “a bit” nervous. The presentation was two hours (2 HOURS) and the entire management team and other key stake holders attended my presentation. It was great experience to conduct a two hours presentation to senior management. A first time experience but definitely not the last.

During this project I have improved several skills and I have also developed as a person. The business skills that I have improved are leadership skills, project management, time management, prioritizing, work across cultural barriers, analyzing skills, information gathering, structure and scope a project (which is hard and takes a lot of time), presentation technique, information gathering, internal marketing as well as external marketing.

At a personal level; the huge contrast between Sweden and India has emotionally affected me to a large extent, both positively and negatively. To start with; the poverty is bizarre and extremely visible. I have been travelling across the world but never faced this high level of poverty (not even in Cambodja). The poverty itself is terrible but the contrast to the rich Indian people and the goras (foreigners) is even more dreadful. And the worse thing is that you know that India do not have a security network that take care of all these human beings that have the same value as everyone else. I could write about this in hours but this is not the right forum for this kind of issues, but I felt that I was forced to mention it.

The thing that I really love with Delhi is that you cannot control your days and I agree with my Co-intern: “Delhi is an organizational Caos”. You don’t know if you will spend your day in the “fantastic” Delhi traffic or if you are not able to work since the electricity switch on and off. I love that you can travel to different tailors and custom made your own bags and clothes, that the Spa’s are open during  the night, that the weather is pleasant (now, not in June), that people are extremely good at English and really helpful. These things are charming with Delhi. I love that everything is not organized as it is in Sweden and that something new happend all the time. It is FUN!

This internship and my experience in India have ad high value to me and I am extremely thankful for this great opportunity.

Unfortunately I broke my phone some weeks ago, but I will show you a picture that Malin took after my presentation.

Have a great day everyone!

Now we are going to have a Farwell meeting for me!

Namaste!

Kendra