Five weeks in and I have finally stopped feeling like a tourist. The city makes sense now, the routine is there, and the things that used to take real thought just happen. It is a good feeling.The routine is there, the city makes sense, and I have stopped having to think so hard about the small stuff. That kind of comfort is easy to take for granted once it arrives, but I noticed it this week and it felt worth saying.
At THREAD the work has kept moving. Most of my time has gone toward research, competitor analysis, and building visuals out of data. What I keep running into is how much of this work comes down to judgment calls. Finding information is the easy part. The harder part is deciding what actually belongs in the final product, what can be cut, and how to present what is left in a way that someone else can pick up and understand without much effort. I am getting better at that but it is still something I am actively working on.
The skills I have developed that surprised me most are not the technical ones. Adaptability was always going to be part of living abroad, that was expected. What I did not see coming was how much this internship would push me to communicate differently. Specifically, how I ask questions. My old habit was to either guess at what was expected or ask something so general that the answer did not really help. I have gotten a lot better at laying out what I think the goal is and asking whether I am on the right track. That one change has made my days noticeably more efficient and the feedback I get noticeably more useful.
My relationship with feedback itself has also changed. In school, feedback feels like a verdict. You turn something in and find out how well you did. At THREAD I have had to let go of that completely. A first draft is not a finished product and nobody treats it like one. It is just the thing you bring to the table so the real conversation can start. Once I stopped being precious about early versions of my work, everything moved faster and came out better.
On the harder skills side, data organization has been where I have put the most time. Many of my projects involve pulling together details from a lot of different companies — fund sizes, investment focus, ownership ranges, portfolio breakdowns — and structuring it in a way that actually lets you compare things clearly. The tricky part is that companies report information differently, some are transparent and some are not, and you have to make real decisions about how to handle the gaps honestly. I have gotten much more comfortable with that kind of ambiguity over the past few weeks.
The cultural thing that has stuck with me most this week is harder to put into words but I will try. People at THREAD work hard. The output is good and everyone takes their work seriously. But there is no performance attached to it. Nobody is broadcasting how busy they are or how late they stayed or how much they have going on. The work gets done and then people leave and have actual lives. I grew up in a culture that often rewards the performance of effort as much as the effort itself, and seeing a different way of operating every day has made me think about what I actually want to carry into my career and what I am better off leaving behind.
More than any single skill, what I think I am taking home from this experience is a better understanding of how I work. What helps me focus, what gets in my way, and what kind of environment brings out my best. That is not something you can learn in a classroom. You have to actually be somewhere new, doing real work, navigating real uncertainty, to figure it out. Jumping into the deep end by coming here to learn has been a great experience and has allowed me to force my self to swim. Experience has always worked out better for me when learning applicable skills which I have absolutely achieved here so far.