During my final week at my internship in Madrid, I have been working on wrapping up all of the projects I’ve been working on. One the last day of the program, I have a final presentation to the marketing and consulting team on market research that I have been doing and have to submit all of the website translations that I have been doing. In my internship, I feel like I have been successful in the position I’m in with the marketing and consulting teams.
A successful employee in this company seems to be someone who completes what they are responsible for and that has a good relationship with their coworkers. I think that every project that I have been given, I have done a good job on. On the mid term feedback that I got from my supervisor, she said that I had done very well with everything she had given me and was happy with the quality of my work. Some of the projects that I have been working on are going to be in use for their clients after I leave, so I also take that as a marker of my success. The biggest project that I had was to manually translate the website into English. I was really nervous to do this since it involved writing and editing html code, but I feel like I have gotten very good at it. Since I was doing well, I was also assigned to help edit more pages on the website and have been doing well at that too. There is another person on the IT team who is bilingual and spent their time between Spain and the US growing up who has been reviewing my translations. In their feedback, they said they though that I had done a very good job and had no issues officially publishing the translated pages on the official impact hub website. Since I was nervous about this project to begin with, but ended up getting really good feedback, I feel like it sands out to me as one of my markers for being successful at my internship.
Another field that I feel like I have had a lot of success in is building relationships with my coworkers and getting more comfortable with them. Over the course of the program, I feel like I have gotten a lot more comfortable with talking to my coworkers. In the beginning, I felt a little awkward initiating any conversation because the team that I spend most of the time with have been together for a long time and are all friends outside of work. I was really grateful that they really tried to include me in conversations or invited me to lunch when all of them were going to a restaurant in the area. They were also very patient with me when I didn’t know how to say something in Spanish. Not knowing a word was some of what was holding me back from initiating conversation as much in the beginning. I found that I did want to talk to my coworkers about something or join in a conversation, but I couldn’t pick up on everything that they were saying or didn’t know a word that I needed. Over the course of the internship, I have gotten a lot more comfortable with doing that and since it was a major goal for me and a main reason that I chose to do this program, I really felt like it had been a success after hearing the feedback from my coworker.
Another thing that I feel like is a personal marker of success for me is getting feedback that my conversational and professional Spanish has improved. Last week I was talking with someone from the marketing team about my translation project about what the meaning of a word was and she commented how she was impressed that I was not having to go to anyone with many translation questions outside of that. Hearing that feedback gave me a lot of confidence in my translating skills and the project was really good experience for me. I have been thinking about working on getting good enough at Spanish to earn a certification in translating to help build up my resume and working on this project has made me feel like its something I could actually do, which is not what I felt like going into this program. Overall, this has been a really good experience for me and I’m glad I have had the opportunity to work with the Impact hub. I think that I have been able to be a successful employee by intern standards so far and know that I have definitely met my own standards of success.