After my first week in Madrid, I can confidently say it’s everything I imagined and more. The breadth of people and places here never ceases to amaze me. I’m strangely reminded of New York City while in Madrid. Just like in New York, there are people from many different places, with different languages and ways of dressing. But unlike New York, I’m struck by how clean everything is and the sense of community I feel here. Speaking to locals I feel a common understanding in the familiar way I’m greeted and a sentiment that they are here to help each other in everyone’s willingness to help. I define my first impression as beautiful buildings, a coming-together of different peoples, and young people enjoying life to the fullest.
Here’s a flamenco performance we saw yesterday. The man farthest in the back of the stage was teaching our group to dance flamenco just an hour beforehand!
Here are some of the things that surprised me the most. Firstly, everyone drinks tap water here. In the U.S, everything is bottled or put through a filter. In Madrid, the guides and host families always talk about how the water here is incredibly clean. While touring the older parts of the city near Plaza del Sol, my friends and I filled our water bottles from a metal nozzle in the middle of a street. Similarly, the food here is both simple and vibrant. The bread and fruit in particular are so much better than in the U.S. I attribute this to bread being made in bakeries rather than factories, and fruit being grown somehow more naturally.
The public transportation here is also more efficient, cheap, and clean compared to that of American cities such as New York. I bought unlimited usage of all public transportation here, including buses, metro, and bullet train, with eight euros. Lastly, there is so much history here. Around Plaza Del Sol there are countless restaurants and fish markets built into tall colorful brick buildings winding around cobblestone streets, all hundreds of years old.
Here’s a picture of me near Plaza del Sol
Alright, time to talk about the actual job. While in Spain, I’ll be working within the marketing department of an NGO called Smile and Learn that distributes multilingual online education. Online learning exists within both the education and IT industries as the company both chooses how to teach students and designs the application the students learn through. As a member of the marketing department, my duties relate to helping the Smile and Learn app reach a wider audience in one way or another. I will spend the majority of my time in Madrid working on deliverables for the company’s summertime and back to school projects.
To efficiently complete the deliverables with a high level of quality, I must be able to write clearly in both Spanish and English. When I write, I also need to utilize a style that draws the attention of educators by demonstrating how the Smile and Learn app can benefit all students between the ages of 3-12. One point I’ve made sure to highlight is the thousands of game-like activities the platform offers as well as the accommodations the designers built in for learners will all kinds of physical or mental disabilities.
I’ve had to become used to writing flexibly such that I can easily pivot targets for my writing. That is to say I’ve had to learn quickly how different word and sentence structures best fit different social media platforms. Great examples are learning to write within the different requirements and word counts of a blog post, a social media post versus a story, how to write for LinkedIn versus Instagram, and how to write for an emailed newsletter versus the landing page on the main website that the newsletter has a link to.
Here’s a picture I took in front of my homestay
My supervisor also requires a degree of creative ability from me. Marketing is nothing without eye-catchingly aesthetic visuals filled with colors and landscapes of mountains with oceans reflecting the stars. That’s even more true for a business that markets a product intended for children. Cartoon animals, and flower-filled scenery cover each newsletter and Instagram post. What that means for me is that I’ve had to get good with Canva immediately. Starting from my pre-interview test where I designed an infographic, I’ve since been finding and creating visually appealing templates to go along with my writing.
The smaller but most enjoyable aspect of my job is analyzing the marketing content Smile and Learn’s competitors put out. This is my favorite because it’s when I feel I’m making the biggest individual difference for the organization by doing something alone that directly relates to getting ahead of the competition. I’ve only done this once so far in my two days at work, but in that one instance annotating a single competitor’s newsletter took me thirty minutes, and I annotated six.
Of course, the biggest aspect of my internship is the biggest aspect of life in Madrid: Speaking Spanish! To ask where the coffee machine is, to participate in conversation at lunch, and to persuade my supervisor I have any idea what I’m doing, I need to communicate in Spanish. Thus far, I’ve gotten the coffee part down.