This past weekend I traveled through Italy with two friends. We hit Rome, Florence, and Bologna, and packed in as much as we could in our short three day trip. In Rome we saw the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Trevi Fountain. Florence gave us the Galleria, where I stood in front of work by da Vinci and Michelangelo that I had only ever seen in pictures. Bologna was a quiet town and mostly about trying new food, which across all three cities was the best I have had on this trip. Fresh pizza, pasta, Bolognese in the city it is named after, and of course gelato at every stop. We walked until our feet hurt and ate back every calorie burned. It was the kind of weekend that makes studying abroad feel worth every bit of effort it took to get here.
Coming back to Prague and to the office pulled me right back into my DACH expansion project, which has become the center of my work at Peakforce for my last two weeks. This is where I have learned the most about how people communicate differently across cultures. The project has me building a target list of German companies for outreach, and a majority of work is exploring companies who operate in German. Company websites, job titles, the public records I use to track down the right contacts, all of it. I translate each site myself and read it closely before I decide whether a company belongs on my list. Early on I tried to move fast and skim companies the way I would with an English page, but I kept getting things wrong or mixed up. I would misread what a company actually did or who the right person to contact was. The German market does not help with that kind of guessing because they have many similar words that mean different things. It taught me quickly that precision was the key and that slowing down to fully understand the meaning is the only way.
Germany sits far toward the low-context end, and the whole DACH project runs on that. When I write the reason a specific company would want to hear from me during outreach, I cannot lean on something vague like they seem like a strong fit. I have to name the exact reason and back it with something concrete I found on their own site. Evidence is everything. Working inside that standard has slowly retrained how I write and think, and it has made me a sharper and more careful communicator than I was when I got here.
I have felt the same low-context directness in how I work with my boss. His English is not perfect, which means the American habits I did not even notice I had, hinting at a point instead of stating it directly, wrapping an idea in casual filler, or assuming the other person will fill in the gaps simply does not work with him. When I explain something the way I would to a friend back home, I can see it not land with visible confusion or questions. Because of this I have learned to strip my ideas down to the main point and say them plainly. His feedback comes the same way. When something in my work is off he tells me directly and then tells me how to fix it, with none of the cushion I am used to at home. At first it felt blunt, but I have come to see it as one of the best parts of this internship. He is not being harsh. He is being clear, and he assumes I want to improve enough to hear it straight. I get more genuine coaching from this approach and I feel as if it has helped me deliver stronger work.
Living inside a low-context work culture has changed how I think about communication as a student and future professional. The point of this experience I have understood most is learning to read the environment. This is especially hard at first as I did not grow up in this environment and adjusting how I got my point across took a lot of time to get used to without losing what I am trying to say. Prague and my work in the German market have shown me that my natural instinct is to hint at ideas without a clear explanation. I now understand and see how this confuses people who communicate more literally, and that cutting it out makes me clearer no matter where I am. When I start work in 2027 I will work with people from many different backgrounds who wont know or understand my assumptions. With building this new habit to be more straightforward I am going to use this to transfer my skills straight into all of these new experiences.
