As of writing this blog post I am now four weeks into my internship abroad in Dublin as an analyst with Carysfort Capital. As I enter each week, the assignments I get become progressively more challenging and important to the firm. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a financial model to help better estimate the potential value of future developments for the firm to purse as an investment. With this I also did the research to determine the rent values of the units in the development along with their present value, the state of the competition in terms of other landlords in the area, and the projected timeline for the development to be built with units rented out. I also had the opportunity to develop PowerPoint slides for each of the individual developments Carysfort Capital already has ownership of in the towns of Shackleton, Finglas, as well as the south docks of Dublin. These slides will be used to show potential investors our higher rate of return, statistics about our tenants as well how fast we are able to rent out all the units compared to when the property was acquired.
One aspect of Ireland’s culture that I had to learn to adapt is the fact that Dublin is on Irish Standard Time while at home near Philadelphia I am on Eastern time, meaning that Dublin is five hours ahead. The meetings with our biggest investor partner are earlier in the day in terms of Dublin time, and although the meetings are optional for me to jump into, I’ll still attend around 5am EST time just so I can make sure I’m must up date with information in terms of which deals we will be looking more into or deals that will be dropped so I can better prioritize the projects and estimates I am given to work on. I’ve also learned to better keep track of the time difference by using a clock widget on my phone that displays the time in Dublin along with the time at home.
Compared to the work environment I’ve had previous experience in within my home country of the U.S., I have found that communications between coworkers are a lot more informal. Where my coworkers and I would normally send grammatically correct and meticulously written emails to our supervisor, I instead now use Microsoft teams to contact my supervisors and was surprised when I received abbreviated words such as “tks” instead of “thanks” from my supervisor as well as receiving thumbs up emojis from the analyst I’m training under, and short three-word texts as opposed to long drawn-out sentences. However, I still make sure that when I’m contacting those from outside the company such as potential clients, I use the same formal email phrasing and formatting that I would be using in the U.S.
Another part of my host country’s culture that caught me off guard was directions being much vaguer than I was used to in my previous experience. For example, last week I did a lot of work within PowerPoint creating slides for the various properties owned by Carysfort Capital. These PowerPoint slides had to consist of around four-eight graphs each, with two-three slides geared towards each property. Instead of being told directly which graphs I should be utilizing, I had to come up with my own ideas based on the data provided by each property, which varied a wide amount. Through a lot of trial and error, rearranging data, a ton of shifting graphs in PowerPoint to make sure they are the perfect length apart and using the critical thinking skills I have picked up from my classes at Pitt, I was able to successfully create slides for each property that will be showed to the main investors as well as prospective investors for Carysfort Capital.
The last cultural difference from my host country I have found difficult to assimilate to is that not everything needs to be done immediately after it is assigned. I’d on occasion be assigned something around the closing hours of my internship day, and since I’m used to completing things after working hours to make sure it’s finished in time for tomorrow, my supervisors have been surprised when within the first five minutes of the next day I already had it completed due to working on it the night before. However, I don’t think I’ll change this habit because I feel that it demonstrates my dedication to succeeding and getting the most out of my internship because getting one project done frees up time for another.