Servus everyone!
I am coming to you live from in front of the Residenz in Munich, Germany! Connor, a member from our group, and I took a weekend trip to Munich since it was both on our bucket lists!
It all started on Friday at 4:30am, where we took our train from Berlin to Munich. We woke up super early for this train to hopefully be in Munich by 9:30am, but our train had other ideas… We were about 2/3 of the way to Munich, when all of a sudden the train came to a halt in the middle of nowhere. We were super confused and then all of a sudden we were told that we needed to wait for the fire department to show up. Yep, that’s right. A section of our train apparently had caught on fire! Everyone was fine, as I believe it was a baggage car that caught on fire.
When we eventually got to Munich, we started exploring and found ourselves in many different churches and even the crypt of König Ludwig II. On Saturday, our main events started, as we went over to the Allianz Arena and toured the facilities of my favorite soccer team, FC Bayern. I felt like a little kid being able to tour the stadium and go shopping for some new merch.
After that, we went to the Rezidenz and while Connor toured the inside, I went shopping in the Altsadt. Today, we mainly walked around Schloss Nymphenberg and went to a couple restaurants in the Altstadt.
But bringing everything back to why I am here in the first place: work. Even though I had a short week, I had a decently productive week, where I mainly focused on writing a blog post for Formly’s website. This project felt very intimidating to me because I had to write like I was an expert on a topic that I did not know very much about. However, since I have been writing blog posts here every week, I was able to transfer a few writing skills over to that assignment.
Learning new skills was the main point I wanted to focus on during this internship. Since I had no professional experience prior, I wanted to learn as much as possible. Naturally, I am able to break up these skills into hard skills and soft skills.
First, let’s talk about the hard skills. Mainly during this internship, I have been doing research, and then putting together a report or analysis based on what I am finding. Research is a valuable skill, because even though it can take a long time, most jobs in the future will require some sort of research component. While it may not be the most enjoyable at times, I find the research pretty interesting, and I know that knowing the industry will help me in the future. In the next coming weeks, I will be learning some new skills, like TAM, SAM, SOM analysis skills, and financial projection skills. I am particularly interested in the financial projecting skills, as it pertains to my major back at school.
As for soft skills, I have been learning a lot about adaptability, communication, and prioritization. I have to be adaptable, since Formly is a startup and most of the team lives in pother countries. I have to be mindful of when I ask Spencer, the CEO, a question because he lives in the US, so I need to make sure I ask at the right time so he sees it. Along with that comes communication. From the beginning, I was told that if there is a task that I feel does not feel relevant to what I am trying to get out of the internship, just ask for a new task. This can be hard, because it feels weird to say that something they assigned me does not feel relevant. I also had to do some communicating when I presented my competitor analysis to the team as well. Lastly comes prioritization. This becomes especially tough when I have to balance two internships at the same time. The time is counting down until 247 Fighting Championship’s next event, and as a social media intern, I’ve had to do a lot of preparation for that. Sometimes when I am at Formly, I start to think and work on some stuff for 247, but I always manage to get my tasks finished. I think it is important to prioritize the tasks for the company I am presently at, but I also need to have things done for 2 companies.
As for cross cultural competencies, I have not had to use a ton of German in the workplace, as many people are not from Germany in the collaborative space. The only problem is that I want to use German. To navigate this, I set up a lunch with Britta, our in-country program manager to speak some German. I will also be asking Severin if we can speak more German in the future, as I have found sometimes when I am out and about that I struggle.
I am super excited about the coming week, so I hope you will return to my blog and find out what I am up to!
Until then,
Auf Wiedersehen!