A Lecturer’s Internship Experience

March 31, 2020

While many often associate lecturers with teaching and internship experiences with soon-to-be-graduates, it is understandable when people are perplexed to hear about a lecturer undergoing an internship. Esaline Marie Spykerman, currently a Mass Communication and Business lecturer at INTI International College Subang (INTI), shares about her Faculty Industry Attachment (FIA) experience with Vinda Malaysia, along with how her experience has impacted her and her way of teaching.

Esaline Marie Spykerman (center) with her students at INTI International College Subang.

Prior to becoming an academician, Esaline built her Mass Communication experiences through her tertiary education by completing a Diploma in Media Studies, a Degree in Advertising and a Masters in International Communication Studies. The eldest of two siblings and an advertising enthusiast, she currently teaches a wide array of subjects ranging from Fundamentals of Marketing to Digital Media Communication for INTI’s Diploma in Business (DIB) and Diploma in Mass Communication (DMC) programmes.

As part of INTI’s initiative in providing industry-relevant curriculum and in empowering lecturers to experience today’s workplace for themselves, Esaline joined Vinda Malaysia through INTI’s FIA programme as an advertising consultant.

“Over the course of my two-weeks attachment with Vinda, I developed a brand equity campaign proposal using digital advertising tools and approaches to increase the brand’s awareness among their targeted audience and prospective employees. The campaign aimed to initiate brand equity among their target audience, to form an emotional connection with them (the brand’s audience) and to promote word of mouth among the brand’s targeted audience,” shared Esaline.

When asked about how she felt about her experience, Esaline expressed, “I have been assessing creative strategies developed by my students for years through my role as an academician. While at Vinda, I bore the responsibility of developing the creative strategies for the organisation myself, so I thoroughly enjoyed channelling my professional expertise differently.”

Esaline (front row, right) with her FIA employer, Clayton Tan, HR Director for Vinda Malaysia, (front row, second from right) and her INTI colleagues posing for a photograph after Esaline’s FIA programme completion.

Esaline shared that while she has already been inculcating real-life experiences throughout all of her lessons and developing industry collaborations for her students’ assignments and employer projects at INTI, she was grateful for INTI’s FIA programme because it helped her develop her own understanding about industry’s expectations and challenges, which she could then share with her students and enhance their learning experiences.

Tan Lin Nah, Chief Executive Officer of INTI International University & Colleges, shared that INTI’s FIA programme is one of the many efforts the institution is carrying out to create industry-ready graduates for Industry 4.0.

“Our FIA programmes are open to all of our academicians and it allows them to stay abreast with the latest industry developments, better communicate industry expectations to their students, and share their insights on business trends with our future professionals who are learning in the classroom,” shared Lin Nah.

“It is a win-win situation because our students benefit from them just as much as our academicians benefit from their ‘internship’ experiences,” she concluded.