Hello again everyone! As I near the halfway point of my virtual international internship journey, it is amazing to look at everything I have already accomplished as an intern and as a person through this program. So far in my role as a data analyst, I have spent a lot of time working with various data spanning across different sectors of the company, from marketing data all the way to finance data. The diversity in the information I am working with because of the small size of the company has been a very rewarding experience, as it has exposed me to so many different approaches to data analysis based on the data I am given. One of the best learning experiences I have had so far is that after I complete my work with a certain data set, I have to present it to the company in a weekly meeting. At first, doing so was rather challenging, because not everyone in the company could easily interpret the data, so I had to adapt not only my way of physically presenting the data in a more manageable form, but I also had to adapt my way of explaining my findings so that it made sense for as many of my colleagues as possible. 

Throughout the course of my virtual internship with Wrkit, I have been very briefly exposed to certain aspects of Ireland’s culture that have been somewhat intriguing and difficult to assimilate into, especially in the virtual setting. During the second or third week of my internship, the company’s weekly meeting day fell on the same day as the local holiday known as Bloomsday, which celebrates the cultural importance of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. During this meeting, the CEO of the company had employees take turns reading passages from the book, which for those who have not read it (as I have not) seems to be very densely written—the only novels I could really think of as comparable in terms of reading difficulty were Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. What was so strange about this meeting, aside from it being an early introduction to many of my colleagues, was that I could not for the life of me tell how anyone felt about this book. Obviously there is a holiday celebrating it in Ireland, and we took time out of the workday to celebrate this book; however, during the meeting it was nearly impossible to get a read off of my colleagues due to all the sarcasm that they used. They bounced between praising the book and criticizing it faster than I could even process; however, at the end of the meeting I was talking to the CEO, who was laughing about how one of their previous in-person interns was working for the company, they tried to read Ulysses while in the country, and the CEO said that he could not have picked a worse book to try to leisurely read. 

The one thing that stands out as the most difficult cultural difference to adapt to for me is definitely how much more laid back the Irish workplace is. As someone who has worked in retail in the United States for several years, the difference between the workplace environment is especially distinct. The Irish workplace, in my experience, is a lot less fast-paced and more focused on getting the work done to the best of your ability rather than as quickly as possible. Because of this, I have noticed that the Irish are also significantly less direct with their instructions than we typically expect in the United States. For me, this has been difficult to assimilate with because I much prefer being given a specific task and asked to produce a specific result when completing that task. While some of my work is more directed, the majority of it is very much self-paced and more based on my judgement of what to do, rather than a given set of instructions, which has been both good and bad. It is good in the way that it certainly pushes me outside of my comfort zone and has made me learn a lot more about how I like to work, but it also limits me in what I am able to find, as I am forced to perform work largely from just my own perspective with limited outside interference.  

This internship has already been going by so fast, and I can’t believe I am already halfway done. I have already learned so much, but I am excited to learn so much more in the coming weeks. Until next time!