AWFUL COMPANY DONT GO NEAR

From the very beginning you get ripped off (scammed in my opinion). You get charged an application fee to sign up to the initial internship with I-to-I, thinking oh this isn't too bad? Wrong. 6 months later I still feel like I’m paying for everything myself.

You get introduced to the Thai company that are running the internship. They pay you a low monthly salary in my opinion. As well as this, your contract is on an hourly rate so if you miss any classes due to public holidays, you are obliged to work these on your days off (Saturday's) otherwise you lose your pay.

If you go to Thailand without an agency, there’s a chance you’ll get higher pay (a whole lot more, and sometimes more with a degree).

Speaking of degrees, the partner organization takes your ORIGINAL degree certificate and transcripts so I found it difficult to leave the internship. As well as demanding a lot of fines and charges if you do leave them.

In terms of communication they do not care, we have went weeks without receiving email replies from them.

When asking why we get underpaid, I felt we received a disrespectful answer.

They pay for our accommodation but we pay for bills. And the landlords go to any cost to keep your accommodation deposit.

Upon arriving you’ll have to pay out of pocket for for visas and work permits. We did not receive our visas to stay in Thailand until December after being there for two months, and we had to pay overcharges as a result. (They also pulled us from school for this, so we were deducted pay from school). As well as this we did not receive our work permits until February -- a week before the internship finished.

The schools themselves, we did not get allocated a school until almost a month of being in Thailand. I was moved from place to place by the partner organization with no permanent job. I moved from Bangkok to surin and then got moved all the way down south after some miscommunication and told I was working up north. It wasn't until the end of November (after having to use my own savings to survive as I was depending on a promised job) that I was allocated a school. For the selection process, there was 8 of us and we had to line up in front of 200 Thai teachers as they all analysed our appearances and bidded on who they wanted at their schools. We were then sent to each school after the partner organization told them we were all qualified and experienced teachers from England! When specifically the internship said that we did not have to be qualified to do the internship. So all the schools assumed we were amazing enough to run our own English courses.

I did not receive pay slips. I got underpaid each month. They do not reply to emails. Proceed with caution.

We did not receive a finish date and upon asking about a finish date since December we were ignored.

We were also told by I-to-I and the partner organization to not book flights home on the 31st of March when the internship ended. So everyone booked a few days later. We then asked about our visas, and the partner organization told us they would only pay for our visas until the 31st.

We worked 7am-16:30pm every day. But only got payed on the hours that the teachers actually signed our lessons for. It is advertised as a 5 month internship but we only got paid for 4 month, and one of those months was only half a month worth of pay.

You could go to Thailand, go to any school with a degree of any kind and be on a comfortable monthly salary and pay for a nice apartment with a bit of a spending cushion.

Beware and proceed with caution.