“Is this really happening?”
That thought lingered in my mind during this whole process. I never imagined that it would REALLY happen, as it was said that out of 800-900 applicants per year, Unilever only accepts 30-40 interns for all departments.
Yes, I am one of the lucky students that got accepted into the Unilever Leaders Internship Program (ULIP) batch 2015. A lot of people asked me how I could get into the program as I am not coming from those famous public universities such as Universitas Indonesia (UI) or ITB (which dominated the majority there haha), and am also not a marketing major student. I am a Business Management student of Binus University, a private university located in West Jakarta. Well.. I believe that it’s all God’s grace!
It all started back in April 2015. I was doing an exchange program in Seoul, South Korea and it was two months before I returned back to Indonesia. I was just lying around in my bed until I started wondering, what will I do when I return back home? Every year, Binus University has a 3-month holiday from July until September and I don’t want to spend my time doing nothing.
So I browsed around the internet and looked for an activity that I could do to spend my upcoming holiday. I remembered googling various things such as volunteers, part-time jobs, freelance jobs, and also internship.
Unilever came across my mind but I felt that it was too difficult to do an internship there. I opened up their website (www.unilever.co.id/careers/] and they were opening the application period for ULIP 2015. I decided to just give it a try. The first phase was online application. There were a lot of columns to fill in and essays to write in. Aside from my education background, achievement, awards and other hard skills I possess, they also asked a lot about my leadership experiences, personal values and motivation, and also my goals and dreams. I spent around 45 minutes just to fill in the form! You have to be patient and focus during this phase.
After I submitted the online application form, nothing happened. I didn’t get any confirmation email or any news telling whether my application was rejected or not. I even forgot about it, until a month later, an email came in. I got accepted into the second phase, which was the aptitude online test.
The online test was mathematics, in a multiple choice format. We were given a time limit (I think it was 30 seconds?) to answer every question. My mind went blank during the test as I was really bad at Maths and was pressured by the time limit. After that test, I didn’t get any notification so I thought that that was the end of my journey.
But miracle came in a month later.
It was June 29th, the day of my return flight back to Indonesia. It was a 7-hour flight from Seoul to Jakarta, and during that time my phone was completely off. My family picked me up at the airport and suddenly my dad asked me whether I applied something to Unilever. He said someone from Unilever called him (because they couldn’t reach me) and asked whether I could come to their office the next day. I nervously searched for Wi-Fi and found an email from Unilever; saying that I was invited to their third and fourth phase of ULIP application: the Focus Group Discussion and Final Interview!