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Adopt an Intern at the National Business Convention 2014

Carly MacKay, an adopted intern at Transport for Tongue was one of 5 lucky graduates who joined Adopt an Intern at this year’s National Business Convention 2014. Read some of her highlights of the day. 

I am an intern with Transport for Tongue, which is a small transport company in the village of Tongue in the Scottish Highlands. Adopt an Intern offered me the opportunity to attend the National Business Convention 2014 at the RBS HQ in Gogarburn, Edinburgh, which I willingly accepted!

After a lot of train/car/tram journeys I finally reached the Business Convention and was warmly greeted by Joy the CEO, Heather and the other interns. I’d never attended a networking event like this before but Joy guided us on our way to make connections with people relevant to aid our career ambitions.

I would like to pursue a career down the financial lines, so it was great being introduced to and chatting with various different people with backgrounds across a range of financial services, such as banking, financial advisory and accountancy. It was beneficial to be able to have a casual conversation with people that have already managed to climb the career ladder just to see what they actually do, how they enjoy their position and what they would recommend for entry routes for graduates such as myself.

As well as networking with various people there were several speakers at the event whom were all very interesting. Personal highlights for me were listening to Martin Dempster of BrewDog, the Scottish craft beer company. He was talking about the innovation that has fuelled the amazing growth of BrewDog since it was founded in 2006. As an intern at a business that is still fairly small, it was amazing to hear how from such humble beginnings, a company can grow almost exponentially, to a business with such a large national and international customer base with a huge annual turnover.

I also enjoyed listening to Mark Horgarth of Harris Tweed who was part of the session on Scotland’s global ambitions and Rose Martin, the founder of The Wee Pie Company who was also talking about the innovation within her company.

We also had the choice of attending one of three interactive workshops, of which I chose to go to the one about media, “Prepare, Practise, Perform” which was led by John Morrison of Morrison Media Strategies. During the workshop he did a live demonstration with Ross Martin, the chief executive of SCDI, where he conducted an interview with him, then got his camera man to edit it live at the workshop, to illustrate how easy it can be for the media to manipulate how you mean to come across if you don’t “Prepare, Practise and Perform!!”

All in all I had an excellent day down at the convention, I listened to a lot of interesting talks and met various people that could be very useful connections once I move on with my career after I have finished my internship. So, thank you Adopt an Intern!! 

Carly Mackay
Adopt an Intern Alumni
Business Development and Marketing Intern with Transport for Tongue


[Photograph from left to right: Joy Lewis (CEO, Adopt an Intern), Dane Thomson (Recent Graduate), Zihan Li (Recent Graduate), Carly Mackay (Intern with Transport for Tongue), Jonathon Andrews (Intern with Treacle Boutique), Justin McGirr (Intern with Young Enterprise Scotland), Heather Pomphrett (Digital Communications Officer, Adopt an Intern).]

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