So Good It Hurts: My Drugstoc Internship Experience

A few months into my internship, I found myself staring at a problem nobody had actually asked me to solve.

Orders from more than ten healthcare partners were arriving almost entirely through WhatsApp. Things got lost. Orders were duplicated. Authorization codes disappeared into long chat histories. Everyone knew it was frustrating, but everyone also had more urgent work to do.

I happened to be in a unique position. I understood the operational pain well enough to see where things were breaking, and I knew just enough Excel to wonder whether I could build something better. So I pitched and I tried.

I was living the scenarios I had detailed in my behavioral exams, and it was received way better than I had envisaged.

I spent weeks testing ideas against a process much larger than anything I'd worked on before. Eventually those experiments became an excel-based order management and logistics system that tracked thousands of deliveries, consolidated reporting that had previously been scattered across countless spreadsheets and messages, and gave the team a clearer picture of what was happening each day.

Throughout all of this, my job title remained exactly the same: Intern.

That turned out to be the hardest part to write about. Not because I doubted the work. The work was real. But every time I tried to describe it on my CV, on LinkedIn, or even here, it sounded as though I was claiming far more authority than I actually had.

Truth is stranger than fiction. How could "Intern" honestly sit beside such ownership? The gap felt almost too large to write down without sounding like I was exaggerating. I would collapse my activities into generic lines and yet anytime I shared my CV, I would get the same response from people I worked with: Why didn't you add this? Why did you condense it so much?

Over time I've realized this is probably more common than we admit. Sometimes your title simply doesn't catch up with the work you're trusted to do, and it says so much about the culture. Maybe you became the person maintaining the spreadsheet that quietly kept an entire department running. Maybe you stepped in to cover someone temporarily and ended up redesigning the whole process. Maybe nobody formally promoted you, but someone gave you room to solve problems anyway.

That was my experience because I was surrounded by people who were generous enough to give an intern real responsibility. Looking back, that's the part I'm most grateful for. It would have been much easier to protect me with small, predictable tasks. Instead, my managers chose something far more valuable— they trusted me before my title suggested I had earned that trust.

That trust changed how I think about work. It also changed how I think about writing about my work. I kept trying to solve the discomfort by changing the wording. I'd shrink everything down to "helped with order tracking," which wasn't true. Or I'd be tempted to use a grander title that sounded closer to the work I had done, which also wasn't true.

Eventually I have realized neither was necessary. The title can stay as it is and the work can do the same. The truth is enough. and that’s what speaks volumes about the parties involved.

Specifics speak more honestly than adjectives ever could. If I can explain exactly how the system worked, why particular decisions were made, what problems it solved, and answer detailed questions about every claim I make, then I don't need stronger language to convince anyone. The facts can stand on their own.

I've also realized that the discomfort itself is probably healthy. There is something beautifully humbling about having a title that undersells your contribution. It forces you to let the work speak for itself.

More than anything, though, this experience has left me feeling grateful. Grateful to the people at Drugstoc who saw potential before experience. Grateful to the managers who gave an intern permission to experiment instead of insisting on certainty. Grateful to the teammates who trusted a system built by someone whose email signature still ended with the word Intern.

In a time when so much career advice is about making yourself sound bigger, I've found myself trying to do almost the opposite to match expectations.

It's a strange dilemma to have.

And honestly, it's one of the nicest problems I've ever been given.