I’ve officially stopped counting how many weeks I have left here, mostly because doing the math makes me a little sad. Instead, I’ve been pouring my energy into seeing as much as possible before I pack up and leave Prague. This week, that meant a trip to Malta, and honestly? It might be my favorite one yet.
Malta completely surprised me. The whole place is so walkable that I barely thought about transport once, which turned out to be a blessing because the traffic there is no joke. I spent most of my time just wandering on foot, cutting through streets lined with these warm, sun-bleached stone buildings, with the sea popping up between them in a blue that almost looks fake. The biggest takeaway is how normal beach club culture is there. I genuinely didn’t expect it. Spending a whole afternoon at one isn’t a splurge or a special occasion; it’s just what people do, and I happily adopted the habit. I also could not get enough of the sun. There’s something about warm sun and ocean wind hitting you at the same time that just felt incredible, and I basically refused to go inside. My skin has some thoughts about that decision, because I am now a lovely shade of lobster, but I regret nothing. Add in far too much gelato and pasta, and I was a very content (if slightly crispy) traveler.
Coming back to Prague hit differently this time, knowing the countdown is real now. I’ve been trying to notice the small stuff I usually rush past, like my walk to the office, the tram routes I finally have memorized, and butchering my coffee order in Czech every morning. Those little bits of routine are probably what I’ll end up missing most.
Now that I’m this far in, a few lessons from my time at Provencelia have really stuck with me, both about how I work and about working across so many cultures at once.
The soft skill I’ve grown the most in is being able to run with something on my own. My supervisors give a lot of freedom, which sounds great until you realize it usually means they’ll set the goal and leave the rest up to you. Early on, that terrified me. I’d hold off on decisions, waiting for a green light that wasn’t coming. Eventually, it clicked that stalling wasn’t the same as being thorough; it was just slower. Now I make the call and jot down my reasoning as I go, so that if anyone asks about it later, I can walk them through exactly why I chose what I did instead of scrambling to remember. Learning to decide and then keep a record of it has changed the way I approach basically everything.
Communication came right alongside that. When you’re making your own calls all day, no one automatically knows where a project stands unless you tell them. Almost everything on our team runs through WhatsApp and Teams, so I’ve had to get used to sending updates before anyone asks, raising issues early, and being upfront about what’s done versus what I’m still figuring out. I used to worry that checking in a lot would make me look unsure of myself. It’s actually the reason my supervisors can hand me something and then forget about it, because they know I’ll speak up the second something looks wrong.
The technical side has mostly been financial data work, and it’s the part I’ve found most rewarding. My main project has been taking sales figures from Shopify, ad spend from our marketing tools, and supplier invoices, and pulling it all together across our seven markets into one clean format we can actually work with. Written out, that sounds neat and simple. It is neither. Every market throws its data at you in a different currency, structure, and level of messiness, so a huge part of the job is just wrestling it into something consistent. My Excel skills have jumped because of it, and I’ve leaned on Tableau to turn those reconciled numbers into visuals people can read in a second rather than squinting at a giant grid.
What genuinely caught me off guard was how much you have to fact-check the tools themselves. My supervisors had me use AI tools to speed up some of the data processing, and the output always looked polished and confident, but it was wrong more often than I’d like to admit. It would fumble totals, grab the wrong rows, or match numbers up to the wrong labels. If I’d taken it at face value, we’d have been reporting on data that was quietly broken. So I built a habit of checking everything back against the original files before it went anywhere. It was slower at first, but it reshaped how I see these tools. They’re a solid starting point, but the accuracy still lands on me, not on them. That’s probably the most useful thing I’m walking away with.
Where it all comes together is the cross-cultural side. I moved from the Philippines to the US when I was eight, so dropping into an unfamiliar place isn’t new territory for me, but doing it in a work context has pushed that skill in ways I didn’t anticipate. Operating across seven markets means the unwritten rules shift depending on who’s on the other end of the conversation, and I’ve had to learn to actually read those differences rather than assume everyone works the way I do. The sharpest example has been work-life balance. I showed up expecting European work culture to mean strict boundaries around hours, and I was genuinely surprised by how often messages land late at night or over the weekend. Figuring out how to stay reachable without letting work bleed into every hour has been a real adjustment. Running the regional social accounts taught me the same lesson from a different angle: something that lands perfectly with a French audience won’t necessarily connect with a German or Czech audience, and any lazy assumptions are quickly exposed. Prague filled in the rest. Between a new language, a new currency, and a whole different daily rhythm outside the office, I’ve gotten a lot faster at adapting and a lot slower to assume I already know how things are supposed to go.
If I zoom out, the soft skills have come down to trusting my own judgment and staying organized enough to stand behind it, the hard skills have been about working with real, imperfect data instead of the tidy version you get in class, and the cross-cultural part has been about staying flexible when the rules keep changing on me. None of it feels finished. But as our last day gets closer, I already have a much clearer picture of the kind of work I want to pursue next.
