Hola todos! Five weeks into this internship, and I have officially hit the point where I stopped counting the days and started actually noticing how much I have changed since I got here. This week’s prompt asks me to reflect on the skills I am building, both the soft kind and the hard kind, and honestly it has been a really useful exercise, because when you are in the middle of an experience like this it is easy to just put your head down and get through the week without stopping to notice the growth that is actually happening underneath the surface.
Let me start with the soft skills, because if I am being honest, those are the ones that have surprised me the most. Coming into this internship, I assumed the biggest learning curve would be technical. I figured I would spend my summer learning new systems, new processes, maybe a new piece of software, and that would be the bulk of my growth. What I did not fully anticipate was how much this experience would reshape the way I communicate at work. At Bond EMEA, I am surrounded by colleagues from Madrid, Munich, Zagreb, and beyond, and every single one of them communicates a little differently. Some are extremely direct and get straight to the point in meetings. Others build context slowly and expect you to read between the lines a bit more. Some prefer everything in writing so there is a clear record, while others would much rather hash things out verbally in five minutes than type out a long email. Learning to adjust my own communication style depending on who I am talking to, without losing my own voice in the process, has genuinely been one of the most valuable things I have picked up this summer. It is a skill I do not think you can really learn in a classroom, because it only comes from being thrown into rooms with people who think and communicate differently than you do, over and over again, until adapting becomes second nature.
Team based skills have grown right alongside that. Consulting, at least the way Bond EMEA operates, is built almost entirely around collaboration. Very little of what I do happens in isolation. Whether I am pulling together research for a senior team member, contributing to a section of our training program, or just trying to stay looped in on a project that involves people across three different countries, I am constantly having to think about how my piece of the work fits into everyone else’s. I have learned how to ask for help without feeling like I am slowing the team down, how to flag when I am stuck before it becomes a bigger problem, and how to read a room well enough to know when someone needs a quick check in versus a full update. None of that is something you can really study for. You just have to be in it, make a few mistakes, and pay attention.
On the hard skills side, this internship has given me a much deeper understanding of how training programs actually get built from the ground up. I have learned how to translate raw client data into something that actually informs a usable training framework, how to think about KPIs not as abstract numbers but as a lens for deciding what content actually matters, and how AI tools can be integrated into that process to make it both faster and smarter. I have gotten more comfortable with the technical side of presenting findings clearly, structuring documents so that someone reading them for the first time can follow the logic without a long explanation attached, and adjusting deliverables based on feedback that is sometimes specific and sometimes frustratingly vague. These are the kinds of skills that show up directly on a resume, but what I am realizing is that they only really stick because of the soft skills running underneath them. You cannot build a good training program without good communication, and you cannot communicate well across a team like mine without genuine cultural awareness.
That brings me to global competencies, which honestly feels like the thread tying this entire summer together. Every cross cultural moment I have had so far, whether in the office or out in the city, has forced me to slow down and ask myself what is actually happening instead of jumping straight to a judgment. When a colleague responds to an email more slowly than I expect, my instinct used to be to assume something was wrong. Now I recognize that it might just be a different relationship with urgency. When a meeting opens with ten minutes of personal conversation before any actual agenda items come up, I no longer see that as wasted time, I see it as relationship building that pays off later. That shift in perspective, learning to interpret behavior through a cultural lens instead of my own default assumptions, has made me a much better teammate, and I think it will make me a better professional long after this summer ends.
Outside of work, this past weekend gave me one of the most meaningful experiences of the trip so far. I traveled up to Grado, a small town in Asturias on the northern coast of Spain, to visit my former exchange student Nacho, who lived with my family back home a few years ago. Getting to see him again, this time on his turf instead of mine, was honestly a little surreal in the best way. He picked me up and immediately it felt like no time had passed at all, even though we had not seen each other in person in years. We spent the weekend catching up properly, eating incredible Asturian food, and just existing together the way you do with someone who genuinely knows you. He introduced me to a group of his old friends, and even though my Spanish is still very much a work in progress, everyone made an effort to include me, slow down when I needed it, and laugh with me rather than at me when I inevitably mixed up a word or two.
Asturias itself is gorgeous in a completely different way than Madrid. It is green, mountainous, and right on the coast, with a slower and more relaxed feel than the city. We spent time walking through Grado, eating cider the traditional way poured from high above the glass, which I have to admit I did not master on the first attempt, and just enjoying a couple of days away from the pace of internship life. There was something really special about reconnecting with a friendship that started years ago under completely different circumstances, and watching it pick right back up in a brand new country. It reminded me that some of the most valuable parts of an experience like this are not the ones you plan for in advance, they are the ones that come from relationships you built long before you ever knew you would end up here.
Coming back to Madrid on Sunday night, I found myself thinking about how much this summer is teaching me that extends far beyond the office. The skills, the friendships, the small daily adjustments, they are all part of the same picture, and I am genuinely grateful for every piece of it.
¡Hasta la próxima!