MEET THE TEAM

At every point in our lives, we all desire to be better in all we do. And this is not a thing of mere words of affirmation, but how much we are willing to strive to attain such position. A group of ten individuals all set out on our respective career journeys by signing up for the SideHustle internship cohort 5.0. After six weeks of constant lessons, live classes, and assessments, they became graduates of this esteemed internship with theoretical knowledge. SideHustle provided these zealous individuals an opportunity to practice all they have learnt through what is called a Boot camp. This boot camp is to last for six weeks with rigorous trainings, projects and practices; to help every member of the boot camp in the building of their portfolio, as well as gaining experiences to face and conquer the world of Digital Marketing. It's venue is the Slack app which comprises some of the SideHustle management and other interns. The boot camp also served as a platform connecting these ten brilliant minds by placing them together in a team -- Portfolio-digital-marketing-team-1. Upon creation of the team and its private slack workspace, Kamdi and Jumoke signed up as our team’s lead and assistant respectively. It was basically a few days of pleasantries, fun and cruising for a few members of the team, while others (myself included) remained ghost members as we all waited to be assigned our tasks. These moments were however short-lived after we were assigned our task; and this marked our beginning. As a member of this distinguished team, I feel honored to take your through our first week in the boot camp; through our failures and successes, our getting lost in the darkness and eventually finding the light, and the lessons we learnt from this experience. Without further ado, lets meet the team.

Time to embark on this journey. I call shotgun. Oh wait, I can’t, I’m the driver. So, please sit back, fasten your seatbelts and relax cause we are hitting the roads.

JUNE 6TH TO JUNE 12TH

Just so you know, planning and brainstorming lasted for the first three days of the week. We know the question on your mind would be, "You people were planning for three days?" and honestly speaking we understand your worry. Initially we felt like we had no idea what we were doing, and with time we understood that it's fine to be initially confused; it will make you feel incompetent but you are not (except you don't try to untangle yourself from the web of confusion, then you're just incompetent). Time to highlight our daily activities.

DAY 1: June 6th

There is this quote that says, "there is always a first time for everything." So this day filled with quite a number of FIRSTs had our first project, first official meeting (virtual meeting), first official introductions, first impressions, first project discussions and first strategic planning all embedded in it.

On seeing the project work, we were honestly so overwhelmed because most of us had our 9 to 5 jobs to handle and the project became an addition to the stable-unstable relationship. It eventually became a question of if we could actually handle it or not (just like marrying two husbands or two wives), but the Nigerian in us already had the answer (YES, we absolutely can). We moved on to deliberation on which social media platform to use for better communication, which was between WhatsApp and Telegram. Next deliberation was on brand selection between Kuda and Cowrywise. This decision making process was quite entertaining because we kept having a tie and our almighty tiebreaker decided to play diplomacy. Did we consider our other options? Oh yes, we did consider Safeboda which is a transportation service in Ibadan and we all agreed that with the current okada ban in some parts of Lagos handling Safeboda might be a little too much for us. Selecting another brand wasn't a job anyone was ready to start handling. Sometimes the laziness in you just shows up and you can either overpower it or it drowns you. In our case, we let it drown us for that day. Our determined group leader Kamdi with the aid of his very special assistant, Jumoke, assigned various tasks to the other members of the group (please don't forget about my existence in the group). Actually we were all given the same task: to create a content calendar for the month of July, we were only assigned different weeks and days. At the end of the meeting after feeling both super smart and lazy, we all agreed to have daily virtual meetups at exactly 5pm to either strategize, re-strategize or discuss our respective progress. And that was the end of our first day (Yes, I'm still doing the first jokes).

DAY 2

The usual African time principle is dominant everywhere. Recall that I previously talked about having a virtual meeting by 5pm everyday, yeah, African time behaviours. Brainstorming was definitely still a part of the process. In all honesty, devising creative ideas and ways to develop them isn't as easy as it sounds. You'll have to think till your brain hurts and feels like it's going to explode. Oh well, today we checked in on everyone's progress. We all had beautiful progress visualizations with no physical or virtual presentation of our progress. In conclusion, we had nothing but an actively imaginative mind, and who that one epp with the deadline ahead of us. Our team leader did his best to motivate us all, and he recommended Google sheets for easy access and compilation of our respective works. Everyone hoped for everyone to have their works started or even completed before the next meeting.

DAY 3 and 4

Amazing how much progress someone can achieve in the space of 48 hours. Holla, we went from nothing to something. In the meetings we had, people were spitting ideas and progress, Hallelujah (that's actually one of our members name, I think I like where this is headed). We did appreciate ourselves well enough for the progress we made, which in our opinion was well deserved. Did I mention that we had some ghost members? Ah, we did. We were aware of their existence but never saw them. Only difference between our ghost members and other ghost workers is that ours were actually working in the background. Did we try contacting them? Yes, we did. All we can say is omo.

DAY 5 and 6

We made massive progress. We came, we saw and we conquered, VIOLA. We are proud of what we have done even with all of our imperfections.

DAY 7

We finally made it- barely made it. Some of our ghost members were actually ghosts. No, they didn't die, they were just never present. We honestly appreciate their presence and every other member's support to the team. Teamwork is actually fun when you have amazing team members. And to you my beautiful readers, this is farewell (fuel has finished). This was a joyous ride. We are definitely going to share our works with you because you deserve it. So, I will be dropping our links to our works and presentation. I hope you appreciate our efforts.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W7uSJg3MVgImKRPt3Zs9IE83X5vOES5ZbNm3f6nrPQ0/edit

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ur0vbBxQ5t1ZgeMB3BCtjxHZ_0juVnJ9S4cyREo8-bk/edit?usp=sharing

We may not be perfect, but we are definitely growing.

Wish us luck in our presentations. Fingers crossed.