Hey everyone! I hope everyone has had a wonderful day and week so far. This past week I finished the second week of my IIP and I cannot believe that I am already 25% of the way done here in Madrid! Unlike my first week, the days this second week began to go by faster; I feel more comfortable at work with my assignments, my coworkers, and my bosses and as a result, I have been able to find rhythms during the day to help me be efficient with my time. It seems like I blink and then it is already lunch time! It feels like yesterday that I arrived in Spain and was unsure of how to use the Metro, what my host family would look like, or how my internship would go. As silly as all these appear in hindsight, they are all examples of uncertainty, nerves, and unclarity that I have had to navigate in both my personal, but also more importantly, my professional life here in Madrid.
Before I talk about these uncertainties I have faced, however, I wanted to provide an update of my fun tourist experiences, like what I wrote about last week. Last Tuesday, I went to take photos of one of our groups studying at Expanish during their tour of the Barrio de Las Letras (Neighborhood of the Letters). This tour explored the area of Madrid where famous writers and playwrights like Miguel de Cervantes and Félix Lope de Vega used to live and even wrote their masterpieces. I had a great time walking around the neighborhood because not only did I get to see such historic sites from Spain’s Golden Age of literature, but it also allowed me to get to talk and connect with the students in the group, as they are all students at the University of South Alabama.
Another exciting experience I got to do was take a weekend trip to the coastal city of Valencia. Along with other students on my program, we left Madrid early Saturday morning and took a train to the city, arriving in a little more than an hour. Our Saturday involved a relaxing trip to the beach, where I got to swim in the refreshing Mediterranean Sea (for the first time in my life!), a quick nap on the sand, and then a fun game of beach volleyball. At night, we then tried one of Valencia’s most famous dishes: paella. This rice dish originates from the city and includes rice, green beans, rabbit, chicken, and lima beans in a wide, shallow pan. The pan was the biggest I had ever seen in my life, with it being able to cover the table it laid on, and the paella inside it was delicious. On Sunday, we then returned to the beach for some more relaxing and then took time to explore the city’s center, where a couple of us stopped and watched Carlos Alcaraz win the French Open in a local bar. The trip to Valencia was a blast and I am so thankful I had the opportunity to visit while I am here in Spain.
After discussing my tourist experiences for the week, I am now ready to talk about areas I have experienced uncertainty or ambiguity in my internship. The biggest area I have experienced these feelings is in my university research. The largest project I am working on for Expanish is researching study abroad programs that American universities have so we can eventually do targeted outreach to them so they come and study at one of the language schools. My boss has given me clear instructions about what steps I should take when researching these schools: what to look for and what to add to our database of all the schools. My uncertainties do not come from my instructions, but rather the results I have been finding. Universities in our database have their main university (ex. University of Pittsburgh), but also their business schools listed separately (ex. University of Pittsburgh, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration). The uncertainty and unclear directions I faced was how I should label professors and programs from these schools because oftentimes these two “separate” universities have the same study abroad office. Another uncertainty I have faced is with how to label schools with distinct labels. For universities, they offer only certain programs; for example, only being a business school or medical school. When I encountered an aeronautical school, I met uncertainty because they had a distinct label, but it was not an option in our database.
As these problems have arisen, I have found ways to navigate around them and continue researching more study abroad programs for Expanish. For my uncertainty involving labeling universities and their business schools, I had a conversation with one of my bosses early into my internship about this problem. We originally planned to create new sub-schools for each program I found (for example, making a University of Pittsburgh, Swanson School of Engineering school) and then labeling each program and professor accordingly. However, this plan changed. Because I kept finding that these universities only had one study abroad office, we decided to change it to only separating the programs if the sub-school like a business school had their own separate study abroad office from the rest of the university. If they did not, I would then make a note in our spreadsheet of schools saying that their sub-school has the same study abroad office as the rest of the school. With respect to my second problem, I have decided to mark special occasions, like an aeronautical school, as an “Other Graduate School” and then leave a note next to the school’s name in our spreadsheet saying what I labeled it as and why. With the problems I have encountered, I have learned to try to be self-sufficient and solve it on my own first. The reason I have done this is because I recognize that my bosses are extremely busy and I do not want to annoy them with problems or concerns unless I absolutely cannot fix it or figure it out.
