Over the July 4th weekend, friends from the Berlin program came to visit. I spent the weekend showing them the best spots around Prague. We went out at night together, tried local food, and I got to teach them about the city and the culture along the way. Hosting them turned into a small test I didn’t plan for. I wasn’t just living in Prague anymore. I had to represent it, answer questions about it, and help my friends form their own opinions on where to eat and what to skip. Passing on the things I’d learned to people seeing the city for the first time made the whole weekend more rewarding than I expected.

The soft skill I’ve built the most this summer is asking better questions when I get conflicting information. During a customer validation project I worked on at my internship, I ran into cases where the first version of a story turned out to be incomplete. One account looked like a company called one thing on paper, but the actual client turned out to be a different company entirely. I only caught that by asking a follow-up question instead of accepting the first explanation I got. Any job involving clients, stakeholders, or teammates that may hand you a first version of events does not mean it is the full picture. To be able to succeed it’s important to keep asking questions until the picture holds together.

Another important soft skill I have been learning is knowing how to sit with an answer I don’t have yet. I built a labeling system for the validation project: Confirmed, Likely, Hypothesis, Contradicted, Unknown. That system forced me to say what was actually know versus what was assumed, instead of smoothing over the gap to make a report look finished. In school, an incomplete answer usually costs you points, so the instinct is to fill every hole with a guess. At work, a confident wrong answer costs more than an honest gap. Learning to flag what I didn’t know, and explaining why it matters, has changed how I approach my work ever since.

There are multiple technical skills I’m proud to be building, but my favorite is turning a pile of research into a recommendation someone can act on fast. I just finished a market entry analysis comparing different countries across multiple parts of data as expansion project. I weighed the labor costs, language fit, regulatory friction, and existing contacts against each other. I landed on multiple key recommendations of markets to sell into, with possible parent companies as a warm way in, and other strong markets to hire from. Writing the executive summary took longer than the research itself, because cutting detail without losing the reasoning behind each choice is its own skill. Earlier in the internship I also built a weighted buyer decision matrix. This included five buyer types against eight criteria against six solution categories, to figure out which kind of buyer actually fits what my company sells. The hard part is deciding which criteria matter enough to include and which ones just add noise.

My global competencies showed up most clearly in the market entry work itself. Comparing different types of countries meant thinking in terms of if the countries actually compete in similar fields. These were cost structure, contract law, hiring pools, and cultural fit for a sales pitch, not just which country I’d heard of. Weighing that from a desk in Prague, working for a company that already stretches across borders, forced me to think the way an international company actually has to think, not the way a case study simplifies it down to.

That same instinct carried into hosting my friends from this previous weekend. Deciding what to show two visitors from another European city meant filtering everything I know about Prague down to what would actually benefit their overall experience, not what I personally like most. It’s a small version of the same problems I have been facing; taking a full set of information and shaping it for the person or audience receiving it, whether that’s two friends on a short trip or a founder deciding where to put a sales team next.