Not Just an Intern: What I Learned About Work (and Myself) at BluLever

My first team!

Your first few steps into Blulever will undoubtedly be characterised by excitement, curiosity and five flights of gruelling stairs into the main building. As you weather the trek to the 3rd-floor offices, you are greeted by a fairly consistent theme: perseverance, something which you will build and flex like a muscle as you grow within the culture here.

I look back on my first day at Blulever as a migration to a new way of life. This was my first time in an office, and working life is not something I claim to be an expert in, but I had heard tell of what would be considered ‘standard corporate culture’. Like many people, I had a dramatic idea of what 'corporate culture' meant: Machiavellian managers and lifetimes spent in grey cubicle boxes that got smaller and smaller as your back formed a permanent arch over a laptop. My preconception of a one-year internship was that I would enjoy it the same way I enjoy a long workout, results taking precedence over the journey. But from the first week at BluLever, those assumptions began to unravel."

The role of a rotational intern means you will be occupying 4 different teams throughout the year, with 3 months in each. As I near the end of my first rotation, I am reminded of where I started and how far I’ll go. This progress is fairly easy to see and measure with the goals we set for ourselves and those that our managers have set for us. Truly, one of BluLever's unique traits is the quality of our "employee maintenance" – having a concrete idea of the road ahead and each car on the way stopping to lend a hand.

My first touchpoint would be with the manager of the initial team I was rotating into, Student Recruitment. In this, I would discover a mentor and Charon figure (the guide to the underworld in Greek mythology) as I acclimatised to Blulever’s unique ecosystem. My manager had the kind of comical smile you only find in children’s storybooks and cereal mascots, a deeply kind man whose patience with my naivete was commendable. I quickly found out this was not the exception of a BluLever team member, but the rule. One of my greatest hurdles in terms of this acclimatisation was how integrated personal and professional relationships seemed to be, with our ways of working encouraging a culture of closeness amongst ‘colleagues’, or, as Jess, one of our co-founders, would be quick to remind me, "teammates".

I’d grown wary of companies that claimed 'we’re like a family', often a euphemism for blurred boundaries and unpaid overtime. So I was sceptical of the many bonding activities at BluLever. But what I found wasn’t forced intimacy, it was authentic teamwork, with clear boundaries and real care. We’re not a family. We’re a team. And that’s even better.

Team lunch for a new team member who had joined temporarily from Switzerland

The moments in my fledgling career in which I’ve felt like I had a sense of autonomy in the work I do were few and far between before BluLever. This is an immutable fact of being young, of being a woman and, notably, of occupying an intern role. I have this clear memory in mind of the first week I spent in this role – my first ‘meeting’ – where my manager sat me down and told me what I’d be doing and when it should be done. But this wasn’t micromanagement — it was clarity. For the first time, I had ownership. Autonomy wasn’t about doing whatever I wanted — it was about being trusted to deliver.

This long, tabulated list of goals, which I could already see slipping through my fingers, seemed to be a Sisyphean task. Turns out pushing a boulder up a hill is a lot easier when you have a few extra pairs of hands to support. There are many benefits to a sovereign career, having complete control over what your day is going to look like and such, but community is not one of them.

I may be selling my role a bit short here. I often joke with my brother that I am the mouthiest intern in Johannesburg.

Another huge part of Blulever is the holistic practice of giving and receiving feedback. During one of my first real feedback sessions, I got this amazing quote from my manager, which I have been using as a sort of mantra as I go through the motions of working life:

“We are building a new kind of culture in this kind of work – the things we do are not experienced in a vacuum.”

There are so many parts of working that we struggle with – long hours, early morning wake-ups and bad ramen lunches in between calls – but I have never been disillusioned that what I’m doing is unimportant. I think that there’s an idea of an intern as a small screw in a big cog in a bigger machine – I cannot underline how much this is not the case at BluLever. We take ownership of our work because we see it as precious; menial or not, we contribute to a bigger picture for my team and for myself.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is also interning right now, and it was one of those culture shock moments where you feel sort of embarrassed for ever complaining about your 9 to 5. He loves the work he’s doing and is probably more passionate about the particular stream he’s in than I am, but there is a fundamental lack of support. For lack of a better word, he is f*cking up (and finding out) over and over again, with very little direction on which way he should be falling. While he spoke, I couldn’t get my learning immersion training out of my mind. The first of many standardised teachings I would go through in the quarter in which Jess walked us through some basic learning theory and practice. I remembered what I was able to take away from that in how I approached my work.

Winning a culture award and going bright pink in the face from shock

This wasn't a training course that was instrumental or even relevant to the team I was in, but it provided a foundation for how I would approach my career in education. The support built into our ways of working acknowledges a huge gap in South African employment – the space between young workers and experience. There’s something we talk about a lot here: the reality of apprenticeship work. If you talk to anyone in the CRM team, you’ll find out that the main reason apprentices get let go from their jobs is because of their lack of soft skills (professionalism, time management, etc.) as opposed to a lack of technical skills.

I can reflect on myself in that journey – young, inexperienced and ultimately a 60/40 relationship in what I can bring to the table versus what I can learn just by sitting at said table.

There are many ways in which intern and apprentice are interchangeable experiences, entirely dependent on who decides to take the coin flip of giving a 20-something-year-old with no work experience a shot.

There is a real risk in taking on young people, particularly as untrained interns, but it was a risk BluLever was willing to take on – mirroring the behaviour we want to see in our industry as we bring young apprentices into new environments. The culture can be defined in its commune, both as a way of being and an example for others. I think it’s important to highlight that this is not a puff piece designed to smooth over the rough edges of working at a startup – the work is hard, sometimes relentless, and it won’t be for everyone, but I cannot put into words how grateful I am that this is my first job.