The Haggie Partners team was delighted to welcome an intern for a few weeks over the summer. Robin is the son of one of our former partners and in the following blog he compares his recent and historic experiences.
My first memory of Haggie Partners is that of a vast office boasting desk-forts and an assault course of chairs. 15 years later, the offices have shrunk but the welcoming atmosphere has only grown.
When I started my application to Haggie Partners, I had little idea of what to expect since I was very aware that the memory of a six-year-old conflates and confuses. I was full of questions: ‘What do they do?’ ‘What are they like?’ Perhaps a bit self-consciously; ‘will they like me?’
Research for writing my cover letter went a long way to answering the first two questions, taken care of by the company’s comprehensive website and their “60 seconds with the team segments,” respectively. The third question became a non-issue as soon as I bumped into team members Mel and Cressida in the lift to my interview, as they put me immediately at ease.
Capturing the whole internship on one side of A4 is a hopeless task. I started by considering whether I should make this blog anecdotal and describe the internship through memories such as going for lunch in Leadenhall market on my first day or the charity bike ride we participated in that was conveniently placed next to the pub. However, I realised the common factor in all of those stories is not the setting but rather the people.
The team at Haggie Partners truly brought EC3 to life. From the moment I walked in, everyone was welcoming and genuine. The office itself blends hard work and banter seamlessly, constructing a positively productive ethos that I’ve experienced one or the other side of in the past, but rarely their intersection. They have shown me how enjoyable an office job can be, and the memory of this is something I will carry through my professional career.
Now, to move on to the metaphorical ‘meat’ of my time at Haggie Partners, the work. The work is both reactive and pre-emptive, creating a dynamism in the workplace which reflects the world outside the office in a way I hadn’t previously experienced. The chats exchanged within the office echo this as, between jokes, people discuss how to create an image or alter a perception for a client in astute ways, with the heart of any strategy needing to account for the current state of the media.
I was lucky enough to have been given not only the typical ‘intern work’ whilst at HP, though there were a few Excel spreadsheets which made me feel qualified to complain with the best of them. Instead, people took time out of their day to give me work which was actively engaging and which they found particularly enjoyable. Such genuine care and passion from the team for their jobs is what makes the work done at HP truly stand out.
It is easy to place an ‘adult’s work’ on a pedestal when you are young, and I certainly did so with Haggie Partners for years. Getting the opportunity to intern here gave me the chance to make the fictional Haggie Partners in my head real. And, for once, the reality surpassed the fiction.