Hola a todos- que loca, ya estamos en el cuarto blog post!
Starting off with a weekend update, because it was jam-packed! On Saturday, my friends and I made our way to the national park of Sierra de Guadarrama, and had the most amazing hiking day. The mountains were so picturesque, and we found lots of cows, horses, and frogs along the way! It was great to explore outside of the city and have a nature day- although the sunburns are an unwanted souvenir! When we got back to Madrid in the evening, we tried our luck at getting into a speakeasy. It was disguised as a flower shop, and you had to give them a password through a hole in the door, which was super fun. Once you got inside, they made you solve a riddle to enter the bar (find a specific book… in a library full of books) and pushed open a door disguised as a mirror to reveal a cozy, stylish area filled with all kinds of library knickknacks and warm candlelit seats. It was such a fun experience- I would attach photos, but you weren’t allowed to take any!
Sunday was a bit more hectic, as we took a day trip to Toledo. We started off really strong by missing our morning train and then luckily finding bus tickets, which landed us in Toledo by late morning. We spent the morning exploring and did a short but fun zipline over the river before checking off some of the more historic sightseeing landmarks, like the cathedral and Greco museum. In the afternoon we had a great hour talking to a local shop owner before the relentless heat drove us to a gelato shop and then back to the train station (we didn’t miss the return train!) where we got attacked by pigeons (scary). It was a long but enjoyable day in Toledo.
As for the work week prior, I’ve had some good opportunities to practice navigating uncertainty. One case of this is related to the slower pace of not only the Spanish workplace, but a laboratory workplace. At CIAL, I am mentored primarily by graduate students, who all have their own projects to focus on. This means that often, they must delay teaching me something or assigning me a task because of their own time commitments. So, I had some uncertainty or unease surrounding that because it meant I was spending a lot of time with no tasks or activities while I waited for my mentors, which felt unproductive. However, an internship experience is not like school, where someone is designated as a teacher full-time. So, it is not unreasonable that a new intern isn’t spending all of their days nonstop learning or doing tasks.
To remedy my uncertainty with this, I ensure that I’m communicating with my mentors as much as possible; asking when & where things are happening, checking in if there’s a delay, letting them know that I’m available, etc. I’ve also been able to find small, helpful tasks to do, like restocking pipette tips. This situation has made sure that I’m very attentive to everyone’s schedules and managing my time as best as I can, and while the hours spent waiting can be frustrating and boring, I’ve learned it’s just a part of the job that must be endured.
Another factor of the internship that I was unsure about contributes to these waiting periods- the style of my mentors giving me tasks one at a time. This comes with the laboratory setting, as often you must look at experiment results before deciding what to do next (repeat it, move on to another experiment, change some factor of the experiment, etc.) and that can take both time and other people’s input. While I normally prefer to have a to-do list, where I can immediately move from one task to the next and already know what tasks are in my future, that’s not always possible here. So, I was unsure about how I would adjust to that, but similarly to the waiting periods I’ve been able to be flexible and adjust, since it’s not something that I can change or speed up. The slower pace is simply a part of the laboratory culture, and having this new lab experience in Madrid has been helpful for me to compare and contrast what I do and don’t like about different labs that I’ve been a part of throughout the years, and how that will shape my future job preferences!
Ciao,
Katherine