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Week One - Three

This fall semester, I will be interning for a consulting company (that will remain un-named for various reasons) here in Rome. They get hired by other companies and or organizations to come and give seminars so as to promote a more efficient work place. They help with leadership, contributions, resolving conflicts, etc.

My internship started as do most internships, with a tour. I met everyone with whom I would be working with. My lack of Italian made all of these salutations to be short and sweet. Fortunately, the people that would take me under their care all spoke English and made an effort to either quickly summarize what had transpired in Italian or only spoke English when I was around. This made me feel much more welcome than I was expecting to feel.

My first task at the internship was to proofread both trainee and trainer agendas as well as the corresponding powerpoint. All of these documents were originally written in Italian. Then, they were translated into English and that is what I proofread. As with anything that is translated from any language to another, there were things that didn't make any sense. Thus, I was forced to used my broken Italian to start a conversation to then smooth into English, whilst trying to communicate why what was said in English didn't make sense when literally translated.
This task was right up my ally and I felt very comfortable starting with this job. This helped build up my confidence in my new workplace as well as my credibility/work ethic with my superiors.

After having done the proofreading for two days and multiple documents, my next task was to partake in a webinar, aka the last step of one of their consulting workshops. Ultimately it was a professional chat room, in which everyone that had been part of the two day in-person seminar was connected via the internet. In this chat room, a powerpoint was displayed and through the guidance of the leader (my coworker Chiara) they were all able to debrief how the original training had gone. It was an interactive chat room, thus everyone was able to communicate via a microphone, typing, and or interactive slides in which one could type in responses.
This was a bit tedious to watch for I was not able to contribute anything since I was not part of the in-person seminar. However, I did learn that one should expect many (if not countless) technological difficulties when trying to connect so many people spread throughout the EU.

Lastly, my final task of the week was to research the topic of unconscious bias. Being a psychology and communication double major meant that I had spent many chapters of various classes discussing this topic. Thus, I knew exactly where to look for credible information in order to summarize it for said superiors. After two days of reading and watching many articles and videos on the topic, I had compiled my list. I felt very accomplished and left having learned so much more about unconscious bias. Unfortunately, my boss was not at the office when I finished so I had to send him an email, which he still has not responded. Therefore, I have no idea if what I compiled was exactly what he was looking for. But as the old saying goes, "no news is good news."


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