Hola todos! Three weeks in, and if there is one thing this internship has taught me above everything else, it is that the professional world operates on a very different kind of confidence than the one you build in school. In a classroom, the problems are designed to be solved. The professor knows the answer, the rubric tells you what is expected, and even the most open-ended case study has a framework underneath it guiding you toward something. In consulting, especially in a fast moving, international environment like Bond EMEA, you are frequently handed a situation where none of those guardrails exist. This week’s theme, whether I planned it or not, has been learning how to operate well inside that uncertainty.
This week, our academic advisor asked about ambiguity, unclear directions, and incomplete information, and I almost laughed when I read it, because it described my entire week in three words. One of my primary tasks right now involves contributing to a training program for a major client, and this week I was asked to help build out a section of content that addressed a specific gap in the client’s current process. The problem was that the brief I received was broad. There was a general direction, a rough objective, and a few bullet points of context, and then a deadline. No step by step instructions, no worked example to model it after, no one looking over my shoulder to tell me if I was on the right track.
My first instinct, if I am being completely honest, was to freeze. Coming from an environment like Pitt Business where you are always given the tools to solve the problem before you are asked to solve it, the feeling of sitting in front of a blank document with real stakes attached to it was genuinely uncomfortable. But after a few minutes of that, I reminded myself of something I wrote about in my very first blog post. Adaptability is the core competency of consulting, and this was exactly the moment to practice it.
So I got to work doing what I know how to do. I broke the problem down, looked at what I had, figured out what I was missing, and made a list of reasonable assumptions I could build on in the meantime. Then I reached out to one of my senior colleagues on the team to ask a few targeted questions, not “can you tell me what to do,” but “here is my current thinking, does this align with the direction you have in mind?” That shift in framing made all the difference. Instead of asking to be rescued, I was asking for calibration, and my colleague responded really well to that. We got aligned quickly and I was able to move forward with so much more clarity than I had an hour before.
That experience taught me something I do not think any class has ever explicitly said out loud, and it is that asking a smart question is itself a skill. When you are new to a team, especially one full of professionals who have been doing this for years across multiple countries and languages, you do not want to ask questions that signal you have not thought about the problem. But you also cannot afford to disappear into a corner and guess your way through something that actually matters. The sweet spot is showing your work before you ask, and I am getting better at finding it every single day.
Language has been another layer of ambiguity I have been navigating this week. While most of my direct communication happens in English, there are moments in broader team settings where nuance gets lost in translation, sometimes literally. A phrase that sounds like a suggestion in one language can carry the full weight of a directive in another, and picking up on those differences has required me to be so much more attuned to tone, context, and follow up than I ever had to be back home. It is a constant reminder that communication is never just about the words themselves.
Of course, not everything this week has been about work, and honestly, Madrid has made sure of that. Last week the city came to a near standstill when Pope Leo XIV arrived for his apostolic visit to Spain. The streets around Plaza de Cibeles were absolutely packed, with an estimated 1.5 million people turning out for the Corpus Christi Mass he celebrated there on Sunday. I managed to catch a glimpse of the popemobile making its way down Calle Serrano through a crowd of thousands, and the energy in the city was unlike anything I have ever experienced. People were emotional, singing, waving flags all around me, and it was one of those moments where you realize you are living inside something genuinely historic. For a city that already runs on passion, seeing Madrid turned all the way up to that level was something I will never forget.
And then, just when I thought the week could not get any more memorable, Spain played their opening World Cup match against Cabo Verde this Monday. I watched it in a bar packed wall to wall with Spaniards, and to say the atmosphere was electric would be a serious understatement, at least for the first twenty minutes or so before it became pretty clear that things were not going according to plan. Spain dominated possession, put up 27 shots on goal, and still could not find the back of the net, ending in a shocking 0-0 draw against a team making their very first World Cup appearance. The bar went from roaring to stunned silence faster than I have ever seen a room shift in my entire life. It was a little heartbreaking to witness, but also kind of incredible to be a part of, watching an entire nation process a result together in real time, all around me, all in a language I am still piecing together. Safe to say La Roja will have something to prove in their next match, and every single person in that bar already knows it.
I keep finding parallels back to my time in Plus3 Ecuador, where the entire trip was basically a crash course in navigating unfamiliar environments. Whether it was trying to follow along with a presentation at a cacao factory delivered entirely in Spanish, or figuring out how our group was going to put together a client presentation with only a few hours to spare, Plus3 gave me my first real taste of the idea that the deepest learning happens when you do not have all the answers in front of you. Madrid has simply raised the stakes on that lesson in every possible way.
If I had to distill everything from this week into one takeaway, it would be this. Uncertainty is not an obstacle in consulting, it is the environment itself. The professionals around me at Bond EMEA are not successful because they always have the right answer ready to go. They are successful because they have built the confidence to move forward thoughtfully even when they do not. That is the muscle I am building right now, one ambiguous task at a time, and I would not trade the discomfort of it for anything.
¡Hasta la próxima!