Wow. I have already been here for less than a week and I can safely say the experience has been one that I did not foresee. Sure, there have been parts that I anticipated, but I don’t think I could’ve ever fully understood exactly what it would been to live in another country.
I got off to a bit of a rough start when I landed and had absolutely no cell reception or wifi so I had very little idea of how to get to where I needed to go despite how prepared I thought I had made myself before leaving: ensuring that my provider plan would cover me while I was abroad, knowing where I needed to be, having paper copies of the addresses and numbers of places and people I needed to contact. It just goes to show that no matter how prepared you are, things may not go the way you anticipate them to and that’s completely ok. I ended up where I needed to be safely, even if it took me a little longer than I thought it would.
The language thing in the beginning was a bit rough too. It took me while to get comfortable with speaking only Spanish without having the ability to fallback to english as easily as I could in my classrooms. But, eventually, after meeting my host family and eating dinner with them, I started to gain footing in the language and became more comfortable talking to them. I realized that I had to be ok with making mistakes, and not letting the fear of making them stop me from speaking as much as I could. One of the biggest things I also realized was that I was going to be encountering a lot of new and uncomfortable scenarios, and I had to be ready for that. In other (cliche) words, I had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
For my internship, I am going to be working in computer science, specifically, I will be working for a start-up educational platform that specializes in young children’s education. The company creates activities and videos to teach different subjects. According to the information I received, I will be responsible for doing SQL queries, which essentially means extracting information from a database. Then, I will be creating KPIs, which are key performance indicators that show how the student is progressing. Within the computer science industry, I think it is important to have good problem solving skills and good critical thinking skills, because a lot of programming isn’t just knowing the syntax, but it’s knowing how you can use the different concepts and ideas to solve the problems that you need to solve. Then, you have to be able to fix a lot of the issues that come with it when you’re debugging the program. Being able to work with a team is really important in computer science, and it ensures that a project can be completed on time and in the most efficient way possible. I think Spain’s unique work culture of getting to know colleagues personally in order to work with them can help me with this. I think this is a skill that will allow me to better collaborate with my coworkers in the industry.
Before I sign off I wanted to say that even though it’s only been a week, but I feel like I’ve learned so many interesting things already. Here’s a list of some (serious and very unserious) things I’ve learned so far:
- If I’m going to be noticed as not a local it is most likely going to be because I cannot stand walking slow, and people love to walk slowly here
- Salario (the word for salary) comes from sal (word for salt) because they used to pay for things in salt.
- The Starbucks app doesn’t work in Spain
- The public transportation system here is so effective and cheap that it almost negates the need for a car
- People don’t drink water here as much, or at least you don’t see them drinking water very frequently. Especially in restaurants.
- A tortilla here is not what you typically think it is in America. Here it is more like an omelet with egg with potatoes and onions (sometimes other things). Still delicious!
- Gato does not mean cat here, and instead means a Madrileño, or a Madrid local.
- We haven’t even entered the hot part of the summer yet, and here, they say that Spain experiences “9 meses del invierno y 3 meses del infierno,” which translates to 9 months of winter and 3 months of hell.
- The word for straw is different in literally every single Spanish speaking country. Here it is pajita.
- The coffee here is absolutely delicious