It is when I traveled all the way from Fukuoka to Hokkaido by hitchhiking. I went with my boyfriend and it took us nearly a week to reach our goal which was the National Park of Shiretoko in the Northern Hokkaido.
Every day was a new adventure during this trip; we had nothing but our backpacks and our bodies. We didn’t have anything else to rely on, and yet, we felt like we were rich in many other ways as encounters, memories, and crazy experiences.
I think I have changed on many points. One of them is that, before, I was always trying to do everything all by myself and with perfection.
In the beginning, at Meiji Internships, it was very frustrating for me to make mistakes and I wanted to execute every task perfectly without bothering the others whereas I was still learning about the job. However, while talking with the staff and learning from them, I realized that a company is a team and that we can rely on each other. Then I finally experienced teamwork and learned to lean on my colleagues, ask for help or advice, and divide the work.
Basically, every time a student is saying that he had the best time during his internship and gained plenty of work experience, I feel that it is the best scenario and I am proud of myself and my team. Of course, this is even better when they find out something else, something special about themselves.
When a student told us that thanks to his internship and all the advice that he received from his co-workers, he decided to take the challenge and start his own business plan, I was really happy and it motivated me to keep going!
I think I would go for an internship in Taiwan because this is a country that I really want to visit, especially the National Parks. I would probably do a business development internship for gaining work experience and being able to travel on the weekends.
Thailand is also a destination that I would love to go to. In this case, my dream internship would be in an NGO, an elephant sanctuary for example.
I think that what is unique about Meiji is that we are a family and we all support each other, as well as we support every student. Once you are part of the Meiji family, you always are, forever. Then we organize meetings with the students, we encourage them to share their experience and to ask anything at any time.
I am especially proud of my team when we have problems to solve and when everyone is here to help and support each other.
I think that listening to the customers' feedback is the most important factor in being a successful company. Without customers, a company cannot grow.
We cannot predict 100% what is not going to work and what is going to be successful, but we can listen to the customers in order to do better next time. A mistake would be to think that what we do is perfection. We always have to improve ourselves in some ways.