Nowadays, it seems that every student has to do an internship at some renowned company. It isn't necessarily a bad thing if you don't, but it is definitely a good thing if you do. A few weeks ago a friend of mine came with the idea of doing a non-internship; Instead of trying his best to get a prestigious internship at a big company, he decided to create his own internship by teaching himself new things he'd always wanted to learn about. Teaching yourself new stuff is actually a lot easier than you might think, especially with all the online courses that are available on the Internet. So I thought this was a pretty brilliant idea and since I was finishing my degree at the end of May, I decided to do my own non-internship until I'm starting on my postgrad.

One thing I always wanted to learn was how to make my own website. I already knew some HTML and CSS, which I taught myself through Codecademy, so I just sat down and started to design my own site. Now about 2,5 weeks later I have launched my site and you are now looking at the result :)

The other thing I did thus far, is the Web Development course from Udacity. From which I also learnt a lot of stuff that I used to get my website up and running (for example, how to use Google App Engine).

The last thing I aspire to do is to make my own dress. I know that's completely different from my other projects, but I have a true passion for fashion and would like to challenge my creativity in a less digital way. I've not made that much progress on this project yet, and I think this will also be the hardest goal to reach, but we'll see. I know that at least I will learn something from trying.

So for those people out there who didn't yet get themselves an amazing internship, don't despair! You can learn so much by yourself, you don't need a company for that. Some sites that offer amazing online courses (taught by people from Stanford, Google, etc) are: Udacity, Codeacademy, and Coursera. The first two focus mostly on Computer Science and coding, but Coursera also offers courses in other fields of study.