Hola todos! I have been back in the United States for almost two weeks now, and I think I finally have enough distance from the experience to sit down and write this last post without running out of words halfway through. Coming home after eight weeks abroad is a strange thing. Everything looks the same as you left it, your room, your street, your routine, but you are not quite the same person who left, and the gap between those two realities takes some time to settle into. I have been doing a lot of reflecting over the past couple of weeks, and what has come out of that reflection is something I want to try to put into words here as clearly as I can, because this program deserves an honest conclusion, not just a highlights reel.
When I landed in Madrid back in June, I had a version of myself that I felt pretty confident in. I was a rising junior at Pitt Business with a double focus in global management and marketing, a member of ZBT Beta Phi, a water polo player, an AMA member, and a student who had already done one international program through Plus3 in Ecuador. I had touched the idea of what it means to do business across cultures, and I thought that gave me a reasonable foundation for what was coming. What I did not fully appreciate was how much difference there is between touching an idea and actually living inside it for eight weeks straight. Madrid did not just build on the foundation I had. It stress tested it, expanded it, and in some places tore it down and rebuilt it from scratch.
Personally, the growth I have seen in myself is rooted in patience and presence. I came into this summer as someone who moves fast, thinks fast, and prefers to have a plan in place before the moment arrives. Spain is not built for that person, at least not without some serious recalibration. Dinners that start at ten, conversations that take their time getting to the point, a city that operates on warmth and relationship rather than efficiency and output, all of it pushed me to slow down in a way that I genuinely resisted at first. By the end of the summer, that slowness had stopped feeling like friction and started feeling like freedom. I learned how to be present in a room without trying to control where it was going. I learned how to sit across from someone and actually listen rather than just waiting for my turn to respond. Those are changes that do not show up on a resume, but I know they are real because the way I carry myself in conversations since coming home feels different, and the people around me have noticed it too.
Academically, this summer was the most effective classroom I have ever been in, and I say that with full respect to every professor I have had at Pitt Business. The concepts I have studied over the past two years, low context versus high context communication, organizational behavior, cross cultural management, global marketing strategy, every single one of them came to life in ways that no case study could fully replicate. I watched high context communication play out in real time across every meeting I sat in at Bond EMEA. I experienced firsthand what it looks like when a multinational team navigates competing cultural norms around urgency, hierarchy, and feedback. I saw how the pace and structure of Spanish professional culture reflects a fundamentally different but equally valid set of priorities than the American model I grew up around. When I walk back into my classes at Pitt this fall, I will not just be reading about these frameworks. I will be the person in the room who has lived them, and that changes the quality of every conversation I can contribute to going forward.
Professionally, the growth has been the most tangible and also the most humbling. This was my first real professional internship, and I was not handed anything easy. I was put on a team of experienced consultants from across Europe, given real responsibilities on a real client engagement, and expected to contribute meaningfully from week one. There were moments where the gap between what was expected of me and what I knew how to do felt enormous. And learning to close that gap, not by pretending it did not exist but by asking smart questions, doing the work, and staying consistent every single day, is the professional muscle I am most proud of having built this summer. I learned how to navigate ambiguity without shutting down. I learned how to communicate across cultural and linguistic differences without losing my own voice. I learned what it actually means to be a teammate in a global environment, which is a very different thing than being a teammate on a water polo team or in a fraternity chapter, as meaningful as both of those have been.
The takeaways from this program are things I intend to carry into every room I walk into from here. The first is that curiosity is a leadership skill. The people I admired most at Bond EMEA were not the ones with the most confidence or the loudest voices. They were the ones who asked the most thoughtful questions and stayed genuinely interested in the answers. I want to be that person everywhere I go. The second is that discomfort is not a sign that something is going wrong. Every week of this summer that pushed me the hardest also gave me the most. The week I felt most out of my depth was the week I grew the most, and I am going to remind myself of that every time I walk into a new challenge at Pitt or in my career. The third is that relationships are the actual work. Not a preamble to the work, not a soft skill on the side of the real work, but the thing itself. Whether it was building trust with my colleagues at Bond EMEA, reconnecting with Nacho in Asturias, or learning to actually be present at Valentina’s dinner table at ten thirty on a Tuesday night, every meaningful thing that happened this summer happened because of a relationship, and I will not forget that.
When I think about bringing all of this back to Pitt, I think about the conversations I want to have differently, the classes I want to engage with more deeply, and the opportunities I want to pursue with a clearer sense of why they matter. I think about what I want to tell the next student who is considering applying to the International Internship Program, which is simply this: go. Go uncomfortable, go without all the answers, go ready to be wrong about some things you were sure you had figured out. Because the version of yourself that comes back will be worth every moment of uncertainty that the version of yourself who left had to sit with.
Madrid gave me more than I could have asked for, and I gave it everything I had. I could not ask for a better trade.
¡Adiós!