Working in Barca: Round Two

My internship started here on Wednesday. It ended on Thursday.

It was a disaster. The company that I was supposed to be working with was a real mess. It took me about five minutes to assess this. My best guess is that they are struggling financially and trying to stay afloat by using almost 100% free labor. The company is called ComVort and is an international network for small, privately-held marketing firms. They are a German company that recently moved their headquarters to Barcelona. My first day was terrible, they had no idea who I was or what I was doing there. The woman that hired me left the company in February! The only people that still worked there were the two German bosses and FIVE international interns. That's what I mean by surviving on free labor. The interns were from Germany, France, Columbia, Peru and the Netherlands. They all gave me a heads up on the first day: If I didn't ABSOLUTELY HAVE to be there I should get out now! They said that it was a horrible internship and that the company was really disorganized and there wasn't ever anything to do.

So I did just that. I got out. Yesterday about half way through the work day, when I realized that there was no way I was going to waste my summer in Europe at such a place, I packed up and left. I met some of my girlfriends on the beach and spent the rest of the day relaxing. Best decision I've made here yet.

When I returned to Bellaterra after the beach I met with my internship adviser and explained the situation to her. She of course agreed that that was not the place to spend my summer and we quickly resolved the problem. So now I have a new internship starting next Tuesday. Its a start-up marketing firm. Well they're a start-up in terms of Barca but they do have successful offices and businesses set up in France and London. Working for this company is a really good opportunity and I am actually glad that this all happened because otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance to work with them. The CEO came to my adviser looking for a marketing intern to help him launch his website and office in Barcelona. The only problem was that he came too late and all of the interns were already placed in other jobs for the summer. That's why I think it worked out for the best because now I have the opportunity to fulfill that open intern position. So I am just going to keep an open mind and hope for the best. The thing is....it cannot be any worse than my internship. The only direction to go is up.

I ended up sitting and talking to my adviser for a while after we figured things out and I figured out that this situation may have given me the first thing that I can really take away from my time here in Europe. My first day at this job was really bad and was about the exact opposite of what I was hoping for. But I did not want to say anything until I had given it another chance and another day. So I tried to come up with positive things about my first day and tried to envision how it could get a lot better on the second day. In the end it obviously did not, but I am still glad that I gave it a second chance before getting worked up or really upset about it. And that's what I mean about learning from this experience. It has been my tendency to jump to conclusions when things do not live perfectly up to my expectations (which are usually unreasonably high) and to get worked up and stressed out over it. And I accredit this new relaxed, open-minded approach completely to the European and particularly Spanish lifestyle. If things don't go the perfectly the way you wanted, adapt. Move on. And everything will get figured out in the end. And everything will be just fine. And everyone will move on and continue living life to the fullest. That's what they seem to do here. And I intend to work towards living my life more like this. Because this second job may be just what I am looking for but I never would have realized it had I not had to jump through some hoops and climb over some hurdles. So here's to hoping that round two goes a hell of a lot better than round one!