April 2025: Women in Mining UK 2024 Summer Internship at the Copper Mark, blog by Emily Falconer
Reflecting on My Outreach & Research Internship at the Copper Mark
I joined the Copper Mark in the summer of 2024 as the Outreach & Research Intern, having just finished my integrated master’s degree in Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford. In the year since, I am lucky to have been able to stay with the team initially as Project Coordinator and more recently joining the Operations Team as Assurance Programme Coordinator.
My primary responsibility during my internship was to produce a report on the landscape of other initiatives that the organisation could consider engaging with. This was a great exercise to introduce me to the broader standards landscape and the work that was being done in different areas. The result of this was a presentation to the team and Advisory Council providing a recommendation of whether and where to engage.
The work I did alongside this project was just as rewarding. I was working with the Director of Outreach & Research and supported her in some ongoing projects. These included overseeing the organisation’s communications calendar which included developing content for LinkedIn and producing the regular Newsflash. I enjoyed being able to use the more creative part of my brain to develop this content and it helped me to gain an understanding of what was going on in other areas of the organisation.
The main challenge was adjusting to working in a small and completely virtual team. I had experience of managing my time in a virtual working environment while at university in the COVID-19 pandemic, however continuing this into a professional environment was an adjustment. Structuring my time around meetings and making sure I left the house and went for a walk in my lunch break or after work really helped. I love working with this team, the diversity of voices a virtual team can attract is very interesting to be part of and it also gave me flexibility in terms of my living arrangements during the internship so that I didn’t have to relocate.
All in all, it was an incredibly varied internship that allowed me to start exploring my interests in the field and it is very rewarding to see the work that I started in my internship informing the organisation’s direction today. It is a very exciting time to be in the responsible sourcing sector and I’m looking forward to my future in this industry.