During my internship I have definitely developed some hard skills that will be good for me to have in the future. One thing that I have learned how to do is reading and writing code for the Impact Hub’s website. My supervisor asked me to help with translating the main pages of Impact Hub Madrid’s website into English since there are several startups in Madrid that only use English and they get a lot of inquiries on their website from native English speakers. I had originally though that I would just have to translate the text and it would be really straight forward, but I was wrong. I was told that I would have to be given permission through WordPress to be a translator for the sight and have to enter all of translations. I had a meeting with the head of IT to get my account configured correctly and then he told me that I would have to be editing the site through the html and that it wasn’t possible to just type out the translations. I ended up having to have two, one and a half hour meetings with the head of IT to learn everything and then he set everything up so I had access to edit 20 web pages of the Impact Hub’s website.
When I’m editing the website, I have to read large blocks of html and be able to read it to understand what parts I need to change and translate to English. It was really scarry at first since it all kind of looked the same to me, but I slowly started to understand what different symbols and commands looked like and was able to translate everything correctly without changing anything visually on the final user’s end. I was originally really nervous when they told me that I would have to do everything through html. I had a really hard time in my information systems class, and I didn’t really have experience in anything like that before. I’m really happy that I had someone to take time and teach me everything and now I feel like I can comfortably say that I know how to read html and know how to edit it to change the appearance of the web page in the way I want.
Other hard skills I have learned are being able to use several common platforms like Slack, and Google workspace. Another platform that I’m learning a lot of how to use is Asana. It’s a work management platform that every team in the Impact Hub uses and it helps everyone keep track on what is happening across departments and make sure that everyone stays on target with deadlines or projects that they have happening. I know that having experience using more common platforms will be very helpful to me when I start to apply for jobs after I graduate, so I have been trying to learn as much as I can during my internship.
When I was learning how to edit the website, I was developing more soft skills in the form of problem-solving. A lot of times when I am working on translations, there were a few parts of the html that I didn’t understand. The person in IT that was helping me works remotely and wasn’t always available when I needed help with something. It can also be difficult to explain over email what something means, so I had to try to figure out things on my own by trying different things. It took a lot of experimenting, but I was able to teach myself what a few of those commands were and was able to work around them without making any mistakes on the visual side of the website.
Other soft skills that I have been able to develop are my time management. Since I am working with a few different teams, I have to divide my time between them to make sure that I’m finishing all of the projects that I’m working on in time. Currently my two big projects are on finishing the translations for the website pages that the Impact Hub wants to have available in English and the other is a final presentation that I will be giving to the consulting and marketing team. The consulting team is shifting their focus towards regenerative sustainability, and I have been working on doing market research to see what competitors in Spain are doing to that the Impact Hub can differentiate themselves. I have to form recommendations based off of my research and data that the impact hub has collected from previous campaigns and their social media. Both of these projects will take some time to do, so I have to manage my time that I’m making progress on both of them and not falling behind. I think that if I had two projects like this at my previous job before this internship, I would have had trouble with managing that, but with my experience here, I have been doing pretty well staying on track.