A glimpse of life in the Greenpeace office, courtesy of Isabel - who recently spent two weeks work experience helping us transform our presence on Bebo, Twitter, Flickr and other social networking sites, and generally helping us out.
Every year in my school, all the pupils of year 11 are fortunate enough to be released from the horrible grips of classwork, homework, coursework and exams to go and complete two weeks of work experience. As one myself, I didn’t fancy doing anything boring that would leave me with no useful experience, so I decided to do something a little different. Through a long chain of people I managed to land myself a placement here at Greenpeace in the web unit.
During the summer holidays, I came up to London to visit Greenpeace UK's offices. I was given a tour by Bex, my supervisor, in which I was shown where I’d be working and also had a chance to meet the many people working here.
When I arrived, I was assigned my computer and desk, from which I have an incredible view of the many chimney pots sat on top of the surrounding houses, and best of all, a great view of the top of the 'Gherkin' building.
Bex gave me another tour of the building and the numerous departments here at Greenpeace, in which I met even more people who are all extremely friendly and made me feel immediately welcome. I was also very fortunate to go inside the exceptionally huge warehouse where Greenpeace stores everything from their many ship tours and campaigns they have held over the years. I instantly fell in love with the old fashioned American styled metal caravan sitting outside the warehouse; however, unfortunately I don't think it'll quite fit onto the train to take home with me!
By Tuesday I had completely settled into life here at Greenpeace and was already enjoying it. As someone with a love for anything web related, I was getting to do work I actually wanted to be doing. I started by updating the Greenpeace UK bebo, which unfortunately took me far longer than I expected as I'd never worked with bebo before!
For the rest of the week, I worked on many other things based around social networking sites, including adding a background to the twitter page and I also added an album based around the history of the Greenpeace ships on Flickr.
With Bex away on the Rainbow Warrior UK tour for the second week, I was given the opportunity to work with a couple of the other great members of the web department: Tracy and Joss. I worked on various things including web graphics and icons, meaning I was given the chance to use Photoshop, which I was happy about!
My two weeks here at Greenpeace have been an amazing experience, and if I was offered the chance to come back, I definitely would. Let's just say, I really don't want to go back to school...
