Terrible experience, find a better company than Abroad Internships
Me and a friend were really looking forward to finding an internship in Australia. When we experienced difficulties finding an internship ourselves, we decided to hire a professional to guide us through the process and find us a suitable internship on the following requirements: 1) the internship should be at the same company for both and 2) the internship should be arranged before the 31st of July 2023 (as we wanted to leave September 1st, 2023). We also highly encouraged Abroad Internships that a reimbursement of some sort would be favourable, in which they said this would be likely very possible.
On their website, it is stated a sum of EUR 235.00 should be deposited so Abroad Internships could consider a request serious. If an internship would be arranged, the rest of the money should be deposited. My friend made the deposit, so they could take our request serious, but that was not enough; I had to deposit the same amount, which I later did, altough I now know why I had to.
Long story short, we only got offered one internship assignment. We mentioned there would be a lot of constraints to the assignment as it might not fulfill all requirements set by the university. The deadline was removed since it took quite some time to communicate everything between Abroad Internships and our supervisors. That caused a study delay for both of us. In the meantime, Abroad Internships did not hesitate to find other internship options. When our internship request got declined by the University, it was November 2023. With a study delay of almost 3 months and no valid internship that was offered, we expected our deposit to be returned according to their guidelines.
While our request was still pending at the University, we asked if we could move on with finding housing and the right VISA in the meantime, as we were gaining study delays day after day. They later used this as a reason not to refund our money, because they said we “accepted” the internship. The funny thing is we never did -and were not even able to- as the University never accepted our request because the internship lacked quality.
TLDR: Paid EUR 235.00 (x2) to find an internship for me and a friend. We got offered one internship that lacked quality and therefore did not get accepted by our institution. We did not receive any refund.
Don’t do business with this company.
Reply from Abroad Internships
Dear Ruben,
We are sorry about reading your review. Of course we are aware of the fact that you have not been happy with our collaboration, but in our opinion 1 star is not a fair review.
We have been working on the application of you both for a long time, the profile you presented has been very hard as you were both looking for an internship within the same company in Australia and for a short period of time. Most of the companies we are working with are looking for interns who can stay over 3 months. Therefore we needed a bit more time to find a position. We have discussed this with you as well.
During our proces you have the opportunity to close your profile and get a refund once an internship has not been found. In your case you had decided to give it a bit more time. You also did an interview with a company during that time, named ‘After’ in Melbourne, which you both liked. You have even done 2 interviews to discuss an interesting project you could both work on. This was the following:
Tasks:
1. Textiles Mechanical Recycling Machinery Research
* Get familiar with what Textiles Manufacturing involves using readily available information online
* Understand what machinery exists already globally in this space and is able to be procured.
2. Design mechanical recycling process for fibre to fibre recycling utilising the existing machinery available globally.
* Note: F2F recycling is very broad, I imagine their research will narrow down the scope of this work for eg we may focus on recycling process for only one type of input fabric.
Deliverable:
1. Creating a report to capture all the research, the designs, highlighting next steps needed and any additional commentary
2. If time, iterate on their research in one of two ways:
* Optimising the machinery for efficiency, and sustainability factors.
* Create new designs for other types of input fabric or output yarn
You discussed this with the University and they have some doubts about the project and did not yet agree on the position. Both you and Floris decided to do the internship anyway, as for the both of you it seemed good to get some international work experience and you both liked the company. We can quote the following email:
“Hi Susanne,
Wij hebben inmiddels bericht gekregen van de studiebegeleider. Eigenlijk was de conclusie dat het niet optimaal zou zijn en dat het onze eigen keuze zou zijn of we hiermee door wilden gaan, omdat er wel risico’s aan verbonden zitten. Omdat deze stage nu de enige optie is die we hebben en wij anders teveel studievertraging oplopen, willen we op goed vertrouwen wel doorzetten. We zouden zsm mogelijk (liefst per 1 nov nog) die kant op willen gaan. Wat zijn de volgende stappen die we moeten ondernemen?”
We started with your formal agreement, the document you have shared with us, and the company had signed these for the both of you and also discussed a final start date.
A week before starting you both decided to not go through with the internship and cancel the agreement, which formally had been accepted by all parties. The company was also expecting both of you!
After talking to each other we as Abroad Internships had decided to deduct the final payment, which you do not mention in your review, but did not agree on refunding your application fee as the internship was already finalised. This is also stated in our terms and condition which we share with you in different variations before you apply. We also have the feeling that you, as a professional young student can relate to this and also understand why this was the outcome. If not, we hope you will in the future.
For now we wish you all the best!