Hola todos! Eight weeks ago, I packed a single suitcase, boarded a red-eye flight with my stomach full of nerves and my head full of expectations, and landed in a city I had only been in for 48 hours as a bright-eyed high school senior. Now, sitting down to write my final blog post of the International Internship Program, I find myself trying to figure out how to wrap a bow around an experience that honestly defies any neat summary I could put together. But I am going to try, and I am going to start with soccer.
If you have been following along this summer, you know that I watched Spain’s opening World Cup match against Cabo Verde in a bar packed wall to wall with Spaniards, and watched the room go from electric to stunned silence after a shocking 0-0 draw. I wrote about it a few weeks ago as one of those only in Madrid moments, and at the time that is exactly what it felt like. What I did not know then was that Spain was going to go on and win the entire tournament. Watching La Roja lift that trophy this past week, thinking back to that bar full of disbelieving faces after the Cabo Verde result, I could not help but draw a parallel to my own summer. Because here is the thing about Spain’s World Cup run. They did not win because everything went perfectly from the start. They won because they kept learning, kept adapting, kept absorbing the lessons that each match put in front of them, and trusted that the process would eventually produce something worth celebrating. That, more than anything else, is the story of my eight weeks at Bond EMEA.
Before I get into that fully, I want to spend some time on this week’s actual prompt, which asks how Spain defines professional success and how that compares to what I knew coming in from the American side of things. And the honest answer is that the two pictures look pretty different. Back home, professional success tends to be defined in fairly visible, measurable terms. Your output, your efficiency, your ability to produce results quickly and communicate them clearly. There is a premium on individual achievement, on being the person in the room who had the idea, closed the deal, or turned around the deliverable fastest. Speed and individual performance are the currencies that tend to matter most.
In Spain, and more broadly across the culture I have been immersed in at Bond EMEA, success is understood through a different lens entirely. The most effective professionals I have observed this summer are not necessarily the fastest or the loudest. They are the ones who have built the deepest relationships, the ones who understand the client not just as a set of KPIs but as a living, breathing organization with its own personality and needs. They are the ones who have earned trust slowly, over time, through consistency and care, and who leverage that trust to do work that actually sticks rather than work that just looks good on a slide deck. Success here is communal before it is individual. A win for the team is a win for you, and a win for the client is a win for the team. That framing took some getting used to, but by the time I really internalized it, it changed the way I approached every single task I sat down to complete.
What makes a successful employee in consulting, I have come to understand, is a combination of things that are much harder to teach than any technical skill. It is the ability to walk into a situation with incomplete information and still move forward with confidence and good judgment. It is knowing how to ask a question that opens a conversation rather than closes one. It is the patience to sit with ambiguity long enough to find the real problem underneath the surface level one. And above all else, it is the willingness to keep learning, even when and especially when the learning is uncomfortable. I have had weeks this summer where I felt genuinely out of my depth. Weeks where the feedback I received was hard to interpret, the direction I was given was unclear, and the gap between where I was and where I needed to be felt wider than I wanted it to. And every single time, the path forward was the same. Stay curious, stay humble, and trust that the discomfort is the point.
Which brings me back to Spain and that World Cup trophy. After the Cabo Verde draw, a lot of people wrote La Roja off. The performance was flat, the result was embarrassing for a team of that caliber, and the pressure that followed was enormous. But what the team did in response was remarkable. They did not panic, they did not abandon their identity, and they did not try to become something they were not. They went back to the training ground, absorbed what the match had taught them, adjusted the things that needed adjusting, and came out in their next game sharper and more focused than before. Match by match, they built something, not through perfection, but through persistence and growth. By the time the final whistle blew in the championship match, the trophy felt earned in a way that an easy run through the tournament never could have produced.
That is exactly how this summer has felt. My Cabo Verde moment came in week three, sitting in front of a blank document with a deadline approaching and no clear roadmap in front of me. My version of the adjustments happened across weeks four and five, as I got better at asking smart questions, reading the room, and trusting my own judgment a little more each day. The relationships I built with my colleagues, the feedback I learned to interpret even when it was delivered quietly and between the lines, the cultural awareness I developed by simply paying attention every single day, those were my goals. And by week eight, the work I am producing and the professional I feel like I am becoming look genuinely different from the person who nervously rode nine metro stops to his first day of work back in June.
I came to Madrid thinking I knew what success looked like. I am leaving with a much more nuanced and honestly much more exciting picture of it. Success is not just a result. It is a process, and the willingness to stay in that process even when it is hard is what separates the people who grow from the people who just show up. Spain taught me that on a football pitch. Bond EMEA taught me that in a conference room. And Madrid, this endlessly warm, loud, unhurried, deeply human city, taught me that in a hundred small moments I will be carrying with me long after the plane touches down back in Boston.
It has been the summer of my life. To my team at Bond EMEA, to Valentina and her family, to Nacho and everyone in Asturias, to every person in this program who made the journey alongside me — thank you for everything.
¡Adiós a todos!