As for Professor Gupta’s course on corporate social responsibility, I am super excited to get started. After completing my first Wall Street journal, I find myself eager to learn more about the business world, and to develop skills that will help me further in my analysis of these articles. I want to take this knowledge away when the class has concluded as well, and use this to build my skills and advance my career, as well as engage in meaningful conversation with others. I also feel it is important to be able to defend a point in an argument, while doing it respectfully, a skill that I will most definitely be able to build on in this class.
The internship seminar with Professor Swain was very interesting. I think it will be a good companion during my internship, teaching me how to make the most of my internship, and providing me with skills I will use long after it. I also learned about the cultural differences between Italian and American workplaces. There were habits I didn’t understand at first, but after bringing them up in class, I found everyone had the same experiences. It is not only the office I am working in, but these are shared experiences of Italian culture for everyone participating in the program. We also learned of the possible pros and cons of these companies employing US interns in the past. Personally, the company I am working for has already had interns from the US in the past, and I definitely have noticed that our boss has made it very easy for us to adjust as interns in the company, in the form of giving us tasks and keeping us busy. Some of these tasks can however be vague, and we learned today to be sure to ask questions in order to find ways to make the task more direct, and this is advice I will be sure to use in the future.
My internship assignment is at Tempo Casa. Tempo Casa is one of the largest real estate firms here in Italy, who act as a middleman for putting properties for rental on the market. Each branch finds properties in their respective regions of Italy, and that leads me to my role in my respective office. Our job so far has been to help with data entry, which involves going through the residents of each building and adding them to a contact list for the branch. They use this contact list to find owners with apartments they are looking to sell or rent out. We also are helping with their marketing, creating instagram videos in English as well as translating their ads for their listings in the best way possible. Today, we even introduced ChatGPT to the company to help them improve their efficiency, a tool they never thought to use. We used it to help us redesign the description of an apartment that has been left on the market and one they have not been able to find a tenant for. Tomorrow we will continue and create an English advertisement to post on their instagram in hopes of finding a tenant.
Travel throughout Italy has been very eye opening. At first I was very uncomfortable, being this is the first place outside of America I have ever visited, and I am also not too familiar with the Italian language. I traveled throughout the city the first couple days to find my way around and with the help of IES student companions I learned the most efficient ways to get around. I am not used to living in an urban area, as I grew up in a suburb traveling everywhere by car for most of my entire life. Learning how to blend in has also been a challenge, and the first couple days I managed to get hard stares for wearing shorts, which I quickly learned are culturally unacceptable here in Italy, no matter how hot it gets. I also found that people here live life slower, starting their day with coffee before work (which is mandatory at Tempo Casa), taking their time running simple errands, and even eating dinner at 9:30 at night. I feel am adapting slowly to these ways, and finding myself grow more comfortable with every passing day.
The trip to Lake Maggiore opened my eyes in a different manner. The sights were beautiful, much different than the ones I see at home in New Jersey. Traveling from island to island was something I will remember for a long time, and each one had something very different to offer. It was also my first time ever seeing a peacock spread its feathers, something I have only ever seen in pictures. The architecture here is also on another level, adding to the natural beauty of the landscapes, and I find myself thinking that they would even find a way to make a Walmart look cool here in Italy. It makes sense why Italians walk so slow, considering that they have these beautiful things to take in at every turn.
