- Indonesia
- Bali
About Program
Paradise Interns gives you the unique opportunity to hone in on your digital marketing and diving skills at one of Indonesia's leading dive centers. This internship guarantees 6 months of fun in the sun.
In month 1, you'll attend a 'marketing boot camp' in Bali where you are trained in branding, social media marketing, content marketing, graphic design and SEO.
In months 2-6, you will have the opportunity to apply new skills towards a professional portfolio, continue to learn through weekly mentoring and enjoy life in paradise while diving regularly.
All internships include unlimited diving and PADI/SSI courses that work with whatever diving certifications you already have. Thinking about going pro? Enjoy earning your divemaster certification. Never dived before? You’ll have 5 months to work your way through three different certifications – Open Water through Rescue. Already a divemaster? Certain resorts offer some of the region’s leading instructor development courses.
Video and Photos
Program Highlights
- Free 6-month digital marketing internship. Learn digital marketing skills and build your portfolio
- Intern at one of Indonesia's top dive resorts, marine conservation projects or NGOs
- Earn your professional scuba certifications and enjoy unlimited scuba diving
- 60% of interns have secured full-time employment in the dive industry post-internship
Response from Paradise Interns
Hi Sorcha,
Thanks for leaving a review. I'm glad you enjoyed the majority of your internship, loved where we placed you and felt that you learned quite a bit. However, I’d like to address a few of the concerns that you brought up.
First off, I’m very glad that you found the majority of the Paradise interns team very supportive. As a small business, it has taken a lot of work to get together a team that can assist our interns in the ways needed. As the company has grown, I no longer take as much of an intern-facing role, but am regularly behind the scenes making sure that everyone is on the same page and everything runs smoothly. With my mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis at the beginning of your internship, I had to rely on my team much more and I’m glad they were able to come through.
As for the deposit, I am sorry that you felt anything was unclear. Our entire team has all rules clearly outlined in the Intern Responsibilities board. This has not changed since the first day you were an intern and, upon reading this thoroughly, you would have found answers to any questions you had.
The monthly meetings have nothing to do with the rules, but are strategy sessions where your work and analytics are reviewed in order to see how your company’s social presence is faring. Tweaks are made to content and strategy, but there are no changes to your responsibilities.
As for deductions to your deposits – it’s best if I can explain our business model. The way we are able to keep this free for interns is by charging companies for this service. In order to keep clients, it’s important to deliver upon what we promise. This means if we have promised a company 4 Instagram stories a day, the company needs to receive this. As interns are being ‘paid’ in diving and other perks regardless of their performance, we use the deposit to ensure the work is being done.
We are extremely up front with what constitutes a deduction from deposits from day one. These are outlined clearly on the Intern Responsibilities board and, again, did not change from the very first day. In fact, we gave everyone additional leeway as the program continued so that our team would be deducting less than initially stated.
Which brings us to the recent COVID-19 issue that interrupted our regular internship. On March 16, 2020, after closely following the effects across the globe, we called a company wide meeting. At this meeting we explained that we were concerned about the safety of our 30 interns in Indonesia and we strongly advised them to go home. In addition to to our interns’ safety, we believed that tourists taking resources away from an already impacted healthcare system would be unethical. In full transparency, we also said that we did not know whether our clients (the companies that they were placed at) would make it through the impending cease in tourism and that Paradise Interns did not know if we would, either. While we did not know what this meant for our own operations, we explained that flights out of the country would only be harder to get and borders were tightening up. We also expressed concern at the economic implications of COVID-19 would have on the tourist reliant economies surrounding our interns’ placements and what this would mean in regards to the safety of our interns.
Following this meeting, we regularly updated interns on developing stories regarding the spread of the coronavirus. However, interns asked us to stop sending updates to the group because they were seen as, and I quote, “sensationalist” and “bumming them out.” We were concerned that, by being in Indonesia, they perhaps were not aware of the full issues that would be arising as President Joko Widodo had just openly admitted to suppressing Indonesia’s COVID-19 data. We spoke with similar companies and consulted with our legal team and were advised that we should take cues from similar study and work abroad programs and recall all interns immediately.
Just a day later, on March 17th, 2020, we called another meeting. In this meeting, we issued a directive. All interns who wanted to stay with Paradise Interns would need to return home. As all of our interns are adults (ages 21 - 40), the choice was up to each individual with a full week to decide. However, we could not take on the liability or ethical responsibility of having interns in our program abroad at this time of global unrest. Our team is small and we did not have the resources available to adequately assist any interns in troubles they may face if staying in Indonesia under our program. It is imperative to our operation that our team is able to support our interns to the best of our ability.
Just 7 out of 30 interns decided to quit Paradise Interns in favor of staying in Indonesia. 5 others decided to leave the program as they didn’t want to work on Paradise Interns without the full guarantee of being able to receive the benefits from clients who might face bankruptcy. These interns, by quitting the program, did lose their deposit, but made the choice on their own. I understand the choice wasn’t ideal on either side, but hard choices are being made by the majority of global citizens at this time. The rest of the interns have returned to their home countries and are working remotely, still within the program. They will be receiving their full deposit upon completion of the internship and are free to return to Indonesia when this global pandemic clears to collect the benefits owed by the companies they were placed at.
As for how this relates to you: Upon receiving the mandate to leave Indonesia and complete the program remotely, you let us know that you would be staying in Indonesia, effectively quitting the program. We thanked you for your time and sent a termination letter. We removed you from all networking apps and client platforms, as is standard for offboarding interns. However, we did give you time to retrieve any work so that it would not go to waste. We did not respond to your further emails insisting we create another option because we were busy supporting the remaining interns who were still in our program. In the next few days it became increasingly harder to get flights home and we wanted to ensure we were doing everything we could to support those who were actively trying to get home.
As we predicted, the regions our interns are placed at effectively closed down completely, causing further difficulties for expats to repatriate. You, along with a few other interns who chose to stay in Indonesia and quit the program, chose to go home amidst the closures and had great difficulty doing so – as was our original concern. If anything, the difficulties you ended up facing validate our mandate to return home.
Of all people, I wish this had gone differently. COVID-19 put Paradise Interns in a position where we needed to act quickly and decisively to ensure the safety of our interns. We knew that our decision was going to be wildly unpopular and polarizing, but stand by our decision as the only responsible and ethical choice. This is my livelihood and my passion. We’ve been successfully growing and graduating an increasing number of interns for over 3 years without any problems and, like so many other small businesses in the world, COVID-19 has put the future of our business at risk. I’m sorry this didn’t go as planned and wish you all the best in the future.
Sincerely,
Anna Kloth