After the week of orientation and having a set plan from an external source fade away, suddenly everything got more real. The train system wasn’t confusing, I started using Google Maps less to get to and from my apartment, and the city just started to make sense. A similar thing can be said for my internship. The first day at Carvago was introductory — learning about the company as a whole with a member of HR, meeting my supervisors, and learning about what the data team does. From my role and task assignments, everything started making more sense as the week went by.
Routine set in. Wake up, get ready for work, commute the 30 minutes from my neighborhood of Vinohrady to the district of Holešovice, get a cappuccino or two down, and start on the projects assigned to me.
My mornings, from 9:00 AM until 11:30, are specifically designed to get me in the swing of things for the day. The morning work is dedicated to my bigger, more conceptual assignments from my boss. These projects are typically research projects dealing with theory and application rather than hard coding tasks. The current research project I’m working on deals with ways of applying an AI tool to the team’s shared knowledge base, which goes beyond creating the average spreadsheet or data table. This is designed to not only warm my brain up for the more detail-oriented tasks, but also prepare me for the new language and world I’m about to dive into. Then I get to apply what I’ve learned to the coding tasks, which are saved for after lunch. Typically my coworkers all get up around 11:40 and go to a different lunch spot for the special. The lunch special is the holy grail of Prague meals — typically the biggest portion and the cheapest meal of the day. After lunch I drink my third cappuccino of the day and then start on my non-research based tasks.
What has been evident in the workflow from the first week is that I — much like during the school year — have complete autonomy over my own schedule. The hard part isn’t staying in motion, it’s knowing where to start. At Carvago, no one hands me a prioritized to-do list. So I’ve created a simple framework for myself: identifying which tasks benefit from longer, uninterrupted blocks and breaking up the ones that don’t. The coding tasks are concrete and focused, so they’re better suited for extended periods of time. The theory research, however, is dense and filled with ideas I’d never even encountered before — it needs to be broken down and approached more methodically.
On Thursday night, some friends and I sat down and booked train tickets and a hostel to Budapest for the following day. After booking everything, it didn’t hit me that I would be traveling just yet. I woke up the next day, completed my routine at work, and headed for the overnight train from Prague to Budapest, where we were met with an odyssey of travel. Three train transfers through small towns across Austria and Hungary — including the village of Sopron — were not on my bingo card, but those boxes were checked by Friday morning. Once we arrived in Budapest, specifically on the Buda side, my two friends and I made the walk from site to site, taking it all in. For me, Budapest was a city I won’t ever forget. It’s international enough that you can communicate and get around without trouble, but still its own completely unique place — almost a cross between the grand architecture of Madrid and the two distinct personalities of east and west Berlin. Even though I was ill-prepared, I left Budapest feeling like I hadn’t missed a sight or skipped a meal. Truly a weekend to remember. I will, however, be taking direct trains from here on out.
Week 3 will not be spent with as much of a discovery phase now that I understand what’s in front of me. I can now come into the office, know what needs to be done, and simply start. I’d like to improve on planning my days a bit more for after-work activities. Most days I come home and crash from how much I’m learning, but I also need to remind myself that I’m here to soak up Czech culture. I’m looking forward to coming home from work and stepping out into the city more.
