La vie de stagiaire: my internship at MyFrenchLife – Charles Trégouët

I feel lucky that my first project in the professional world allowed me to work with such talented and passionate people.

Working at MaVieFrançaise was a learning experience every day, because there was always the need to do better and to improve the quality of our work. And thanks to that, this experience has been a source of inspiration for the rest of my studies.

How did I come to be at MyFrenchLife?

As a first year business student at EMLYON Business School, in Lyon, I had to complete a six-month internship abroad to continue studying at my school and graduate with a Masters degree. I remember that a lot of my colleagues decided to make coffee and buy lunches for traders, bankers or insurers in London.

Me, I chose to work 10,632 miles away from home in Melbourne at MaVieFrançaise. And I would never regret this choice.

“Passion was everywhere, and it made a huge difference in our approach to work every single day.”

I applied spontaneously on the website because I felt there would be interesting work to be done, and a lot of it. I just wanted to be a proactive intern with many projects to undertake and many things to learn. After all, I was young, independent and full of energy, and my time to clean dishes for others had not come yet…  And when I arrived in Australia, my wishes came true.

My role as an intern

In Melbourne, my role was to research and develop one of their business strategies.

As a startup business MaVieFrancaise was seeking to develop a partner offer as a part of their monetisation strategy. I worked everyday with the founder researching prospective partners and developing this offer.

The community was growing up fast – the number of writers and subscribers too – so the website needed more and more people to work full time. Since then, MaVieFrançaise started to entail costs. As a consequence, a profitable model for the website had to be found in order to keep it alive, and my mission within the Marketing Team was to help form the foundations of one of those strategies.

Challenges for an online magazine

To design one of the sustainable business model components from scratch by establishing a web of well-selected partners to rely on was highly interesting and challenging.

“We were always challenged every day… In six months, I feel that I learnt twice as much as six months at business school.”

But what I found really fascinating was all the reflection around the offer: what could we offer to partners? Why should they be interested in our community? What is viewed as valuable or desirable to our community? Finally, trying to answer the ultimate question: what is MaVieFrançaise?

What does it mean to be a MyFrenchLife team member?

Deeply plunged into the MaVieFrançaise world to answer all these tricky questions, I quickly understood that passion was what made the community so strong.

What is this force that makes people throughout the world want to write an article almost every day? Passion! What is this force that makes such talented people wake up every morning and start working for the website in such a good mood? Passion! What is this force that created this community out of nothing? Passion!

Passion was everywhere, and it made a huge difference in our approach to work every single day. I had been impressed since the first day I worked there.

Besides passion, the word I really discovered the true meaning of during my internship was ‘challenge’. At MaVieFrançaise, we were always challenged every day. Improving our work was what we did best. It was hard sometimes, but I learnt so much. In six months, I feel that I learnt twice as much as six months at business school.

This internship not only had completely satisfied my initial expectations; it went far beyond. The combination of passion, talent and challenge have been a source of inspiration for the rest of my studies. And I am still thinking about it today.

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