Hello, everyone. My name is Claudia Espinosa. And I will be presenting on my internship in Venice. My first three years on Mount Holyoke all led to the moment when I went abroad. It was the way I had always envisioned it. College for me meant mastering a new language and living in it. After a four month study abroad program in Florence, Italy through Middlebury College, I found myself taking a two hour long train ride to Venice where I was to continue my studies in Italian and on a different, more professional environment. 

Coming in, I knew three things. I knew that Venice was a beautiful city because I had studied it in my art history books and I had also visited four years previous to that. I also had a solid language foundation and a thorough understanding of Italian culture, or so I thought. I at least knew how to order coffee in Italian, which was something that mattered to me. And I knew the words for trash, street, and city square. 

I also knew what it was like to be an intern and to work an office job, at least in the US. Usually, summer internships revolved around very limited funding, which would barely cover the costs of living and sometimes left me feeling a bit undervalued, like I had to pay someone in order to gain experience when I knew I had a lot to offer to these employers as well as them to me. 

I had the comfort of relying on LYNK this summer, which provided me not only with the peace of mind economically, but the privilege to explore Venice, and learn valuable lessons, and develop connections during my placement without having to think about it as a monetary exchange. 

And so I arrived in Venice. And the moment I set foot in the station, my ears perked up as I was listening to all the Italians talking. And I was like, wait, these are Venetians talking, not Italians, because I couldn't understand the word. And I learned that this would certainly be a big learning experience for me. Now, Venice is a city composed of more than 100 small islands separated by canals and connected by more than 400 bridges. 

A lot of the movement of the city is done by foot or by boat. There are no cars or buses, and the streets are narrow and not called via or strada like I had learned, but calle, the Venetian word for street. A square was not a piazza, but a campo. And I did know the word for trash, but I didn't know it was collected by boat because everything in Venice is done by boat. 

So the first thing I did, once I arrived, was get myself a transport card because I would need it. So originally, I thought this was a really big expense, but the transport card really allowed me to experience a city in the same way that a lot of locals do, traveling by water. So this is the Vaporetto. And it's basically a water bus, and it's what I used during my two month internship to get to and from work. 

And naturally, since this is my mode of transportation, it was by water that I also arrived to my host family. And I really lucked out here, because through the housing office at [INAUDIBLE] with the mediation of Professor Svaldi from the Mount Holyoke Italian department, this suggestion got brought up to be living in this house. So coordinator [INAUDIBLE] got in touch with the host, who was a little hesitant at first to host two American students in their house, but eventually caved in. 

And so about two weeks into the internship, it started setting in that I was not only living in Venice, but I was going to work by boat, and could come home to an incredible historic property owned by the nicest, most humble Italian family you will ever meet. And this experience was really a big part of the entire internship. 

Because not only did I get to hang my laundry in a room with a fresco done by one of the most celebrated Venetian artists of the 18th century-- this right here was the laundry room. This was where we hung our laundry. 

[LAUGHTER] 

But because this family really were available and were open to real culture exchanges, which really allowed me to benefit when it came to navigating the social interactions at work as well. So [INAUDIBLE] my position was [INAUDIBLE] University of Venice in the international office. I was eventually given this desk at the corner for the last month of my internship as I climbed up the intern ladder. 

And I was given a series of tasks, including anywhere from reviewing application materials for all of the international students coming in, sending acceptance letters, working with governmental offices to make sure all the legal processes were in order for the international students, as well as meeting one-on-one with international students to complete their out-processing, and then after their mobility, be able to provide them with transcripts to go back to their home university. 

This is all done in the three languages I speak, which are English, Spanish, and Italian, which I was really happy about and really gave me control over the skills that I wanted to exercise during this internship. Now, a lot of the adapting that happened during this job was not in correlation with these tasks, but it was more of a social adaptation. 

And something that surprisingly framed my internship were coffee breaks. Now, in the US, coffee drinking is a very solitary activity, usually attached to productivity. You have your coffee cup on one hand, paper and pen on the other. In Italy, it's not. It's completely a social activity. So I started getting weird looks when I was going downstairs to get my coffee and coming back up to the office because all these Italians wanted me to invite them to go and have a social coffee break. 

So I started analyzing how this behavior really played into the office environment. And I came up with these three things. Coffee breaks in Italy really develop personal relationships between coworkers, which in turn leads to a more pleasant and collaborative work environment. They also give an incentive to look forward to, so work and pleasure started to mix. Lastly, they provided a structure to an otherwise long, tedious, and boring desk job. 

So what can you learn from interning in a place with a view like this? Through this LYNK opportunity in contrast to what I thought I knew, I learned that Venice is not only a beautiful and serene city, but it is also a place full of hardworking individuals and a lot of movement. 

I also learned that Italian language and Italian regions are as diverse as my professors and textbooks has indicated. I just couldn't get a grasp of that until I was on-site. The last thing is that an office job can be an energizing and collaborative experience, and doesn't have to revolve around a desk. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]