Year ONE - Meet Sam

Hi, I’m Sam, I’m 28 and I'm one of WRG's first round of Year ONE interns.

I’m based up in the Manchester office, which occupies the 3rd floor of the impressively renovated Merchant’s Warehouse and my first placement is with the Environments Team.

I came across the internship by chance one day whilst scrolling the internet for new job opportunities. I had always considered a career in project management, but wanted there to be a creative edge to the job and so I found myself googling “events management early careers”, as I hoped it would fit the bill. The first link I clicked was to the Year One Internship and the more I read, the more I smiled, thinking it had everything I wanted and then some.

I don’t come from an events background; my previous role was working as an account handler for a commercial insurance broker. Leaving a stable job to try something completely different was daunting. However, as I write this, I’m less than a week into the Year One programme and already know I’ve made the right decision – the people are lovely, the work looks interesting, and I’m already booked to go to the ‘ESMO Congress’ in Paris in September, so when they said there would be the opportunity to travel, they meant it!

As well as the travel, which was a massive draw for me in applying for the programme, I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into some projects, collaborating with other departments and seeing how the whole process works from concept to realisation. I have no doubt that rotating through departments will give me the broadest overview of the business possible to put me in the best position to decide what avenue I want to pursue in my new career.

In WRG tradition, I had to introduce myself with three fun facts so here we go...

• I was born in a small town called Lobatse in Botswana, Africa
• I have an unofficial Botswanan name – Rapula (Rah-poo-la) which means ‘rain man’ because I was born during a storm
• My first word (other than “Dad”) was windsock