Now that I’m back on American soil, I’ve spent some time reflecting on my eight weeks in Prague. When I landed in Prague, I couldn’t speak a word of Czech, had basically no architecture background, and wasn’t totally sure I knew how to be a “confident leader.” I’m leaving with all three of those things a little more figured out, not perfectly of course, but enough that I can actually feel the difference.
If there’s one thread running through every post I wrote this summer, it’s discomfort and slowly getting used to it. The language barrier was the obvious one. I spent the first few weeks bracing for conversations in Czech to fly over my head, running my emails through Google Translate before hitting send, and feeling like the loud, overly friendly American who couldn’t read the room. By the end, that discomfort turned into something closer to fluency in how to operate without fully understanding the words. I asked more questions instead of nodding along, picked up on tone even when I missed the vocabulary, and realized that my coworkers’ bluntness wasn’t coldness, it was just honesty.
I came into this internship with zero architecture background and two years of journalism experience and for the first few weeks, I genuinely wasn’t sure that combination was going to work. My first assignment, a piece on a serpentine wall in London, came back from my editor essentially needing to be redone. That was a hard but useful reset: it forced me to actually understand how EARCH wanted its articles built, not just how I was used to writing them.
From there, almost every assignment was its own crash course. I researched Prague’s coffee scene from scratch. I sat in a museum in Humpolec taking notes on flax motifs and Biedermeier furniture, trying to write intelligently about design choices I was learning about in real time. None of that came from a classroom: it came from being handed a topic I didn’t know and having to get comfortable fast. That’s a completely different kind of academic muscle than writing a paper with a syllabus behind it, and it’s one I don’t think I could have built anywhere except by being dropped into it.
Professionally, this internship stretched me in ways I didn’t expect. I learned to juggle wildly different types of tasks in the same week like writing an article, visiting a museum for notes, and sending PR outreach emails all at once. I learned how to work under a real deadline, too, including writing up a full museum visit the same week my internship was ending, with no room for a second draft.
But the biggest professional shift was learning to work with feedback that didn’t look like what I was used to. At The Pitt News, I was used to editors tearing my drafts apart, and I’d come to like it because it made my writing better. Here, my editor was far more hesitant to critique my work directly, so I had to learn to ask better, more specific questions to actually find out what wasn’t working and to tell her outright that heavy edits wouldn’t offend me, they’d help me. That’s a skill I don’t think I’d have picked up any other way: learning to draw out honest feedback in a culture that doesn’t hand it to you unprompted.
The clearest academic takeaway is that I can pick up unfamiliar, technical subject matter and write about it credibly under a deadline. Architecture was completely foreign to me in May, and by the end I could sort of talk through flax motifs and Biedermeier interiors. That’s going to change how I approach beat reporting at The Pitt News and any class that asks me to report outside my comfort zone. I’m also bringing back a better relationship with feedback: I know now how to ask for it directly instead of waiting for it to be handed to me, which is going to make me a better collaborator in group projects and newsroom settings alike.
Professionally, this internship confirmed something I wasn’t sure of before: I actually want a career that puts me in unfamiliar territory. Writing for an architecture magazine as someone with a journalism background could have just as easily been a mismatch. Instead, it showed me I can adapt to almost any beat if I’m willing to ask questions and put in the research. That’s going to shape how I look for jobs after Pitt: I’m going to lean toward roles that push me into new subject matter rather than ones that keep me in a narrow lane.
Back in May, I wrote that I was nervous but excited to see what I’d learn, who I’d meet, and what stories I’d get to tell. Looking back, the biggest story ended up being my own — how much I changed simply by giving myself no other option but to adapt. I’m leaving Prague grateful, a little sad, and a lot more confident in who I am, both on and off the page.
