Victoria Hawk's Blog Post #2: May 28, 2024 | 2024 Lehigh-in-Milan with Professor Gupta

I am very excited to start the Corporate Social Responsibility class next week as I believe this class will help me improve my teamwork, public speaking, and critical thinking skills. After completing the WSJ assignment that was due last Friday, it really got me excited to start sharing what we are reading and researching in class and hearing people’s opinions on them. As I said in my WSJ post, hearing from several different people’s perspectives, in my opinion, is the best way to understand a topic and better your argument fully. Getting into debates and group discussions about a topic will help us break the issue down from the inside out and fully understand it to the best of our abilities. I really enjoyed writing and researching for my WSJ assignment and look forward to future assignments for this class!

Today, we had our first Internship Seminar Class from 4-6:45, and I was very excited to start my first day! I was initially hesitant to see how the class would be with Professor Gupta being on Zoom, but I thought it went very smoothly. We started the class by having everyone introduce themselves and talk about their internship, what their company is/does, and what they are doing for them. I really liked this because we all haven’t had a formal introduction to each other yet, and its very interesting to hear about what everyone is doing. Also, I think that it is very important and helpful for us to know how to speak about our internship and what it is, as we will be doing that a lot in this class and the future. From today’s class, I really took away how helpful this class will be in helping prepare us for our internship and future internships/jobs. Being in a different country, we are learning that there is a completely different environment and culture, and that goes for the work environment as well. They have a different work culture here and do things completely different than we do back in the States. If you have already had an internship or job in the US, it is probably very different than your one here, and I think that is a very important aspect to know being at your internship. Your internship will also help you in the future because you could hate the work culture here or you could love it. This is a great learning experience for us to learn what we like and don’t like. I am very excited for the next few weeks of this class as I think it will help me learn alot more about my internship and how to present it for it to help me in the future.

I had my first day of my internship with Gen USA on Monday. I got lucky and am working with one of my friends on this trip, Jen. We walked to the office from Aparto and got there at 9:30. When we first got there, we met our boss, Kamal. He gave us the company’s background and reviewed what we would do there and our schedule for our time in Milan. Probably 15 minutes later, we got straight into work, and he told me our assignment for the day and what we needed to do. Over the next two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, Gen USA is going to a PLMA Trade Show where they meet several other companies/ future clients. Kamal was away at a conference last week and got a bunch of companies’ contact information and reached out to them, asking if they could meet at the PLMA trade show through email. For the companies that responded, I made an Excel sheet of their meeting time, where they are meeting, who they are meeting, that person’s role in the company, contact information, and some extra notes. After that, the two other interns showed up, and we ate lunch together. So far, I have very much enjoyed my first two days at my internship and can’t wait to learn more.

So far since I’ve been in Italy, I feel I have been very adventurous with traveling and integrating myself into the culture. We have gone out to eat at several different Italian restaurants, and I haven’t had a bad bite since I’ve been here. The best thing I have eaten here so far is my meal on the first day of my internship. We all went out to eat together, and we went to this local restaurant right by the office, and they had the best focaccia bread I’ve ever eaten! For my main course, I had a veal cutlet, which is something I’ve never tried before. My boss said it is a very popular Italian meal, so I thought it would be fun to try a traditional Italian meal that isn’t pasta. Both are pictured below. For traveling, I had a great time at the IES Lake Maggiore trip but my favorite trip so far was what me and a few girls did on Sunday. We took the train to Genoa for a beach day. We were off to a rocky start, getting charged extra for our tickets because we bought them late. Then, once we arrived at Genoa train station, we thought we could stay at one more stop, and it would take us to the next station, which was closer to the beach we wanted to go to. We quickly realized that we couldn’t do that when the train started heading back the way we came. Luckily, I asked the people next to me, and they were also going to the beach, they said this train stops at several beautiful beaches on the coast that are actually much nicer than the Genoa beaches. We ended up going to Varazze and went to the most beautiful beach with the most friendly people. I am so happy that we went on this last minute trip and had all these experiences because it reminded me to always make the best of the situation you are in and that everything happens for a reason!