Aiden Tsen's experience as an intern with KEEN UK!
I’m Aiden Tsen, a 20-year-old Autistic, bi, non-binary, British Born Chinese person. Normally I work as a freelance public speaker, blogger, writer and artist! However, I’ve long been interested in KEEN Oxford and KEEN UK due to my experiences with KEEN London, a separate organisation who I’ve been with since June 2017. I’ve gained so much from my time leading sessions and now helping them in a strategic role, so when an opportunity to work with KEEN UK arose, I just had to apply!
Throughout the first half of the week, I mostly focused on recruitment. I took charge of writing the role descriptions for and publishing the blog posts advertising the KEEN National Committee, KEEN Oxford Committee and Branch Founder roles. They’re all excellent ways to develop your skills, push for a more inclusive world, and most importantly, have fun! So if you’re interested, please do apply for them!
My main accomplishment was helping with volunteer training. I used my lived experience of disability and internal knowledge of charities to write and draft all of KEEN’s Volunteer Training Information Booklet, which as of this point in time, is 22 pages long! In fact, I received and contributed to safeguarding training just last Friday when doing volunteering training with another charity, The Flying Seagulls! In addition, I’m now in discussion with the KEEN UK director about potentially giving a webinar for KEEN UK volunteers to use for training across the country, which is very exciting!
Although I did bring my existing knowledge and ability to communicate about disability and charity work to my internship, I’ve learned a lot of skills this week. For example, I can now use Squarespace and Canva, the latter of which I’m definitely going to start using in my own work! In addition, in order to implement my idea of using dropdowns in the KEEN National Committee and KEEN Oxford Committee blog posts, I had to learn how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which are all skills that are highly sought after by employers. Most importantly though, during this week I’ve helped to shape KEEN UK’s recruitment policies and strategy for the upcoming year and beyond, as have my fellow interns. So if you’re up to it, please do apply to become a KEEN UK intern in the future!
If you’re interested in my work, please do check out my blog and artwork and follow one or both! I also love talking to new people on LinkedIn. I have lots of exciting projects coming up, so I’d love to share them and start conversations with as many people as possible!