Professional Internships and Spanish Language Immersion

I am staying in Valencia for 7 months taking an Internship with an organization called Fundación Equipo Humano and at the same time, participating in group and private Spanish classes.

I took this program because I am doing an internship as part of my placement year at university, where I am currently in my third year of a Business Management and Psychology degree. I decided to do my placement in Spain as I have always wanted to learn Spanish and so I thought why not combine this with an internship placement, and do them together.

The internship I am doing is very interesting, with many innovation and creativity projects to collaborate on, as well as HR projects too. All the tasks are related to people and this is something I really enjoy, especially the fact that we work with people from many different countries.

My Spanish course consists of 6 hours of group classes and a 1 hour private class each week. It's nice to have the private classes as I started as a beginner so I feel it's necessary, and the group classes are also fun to get to know other people.

For my study abroad program in Valencia, I firstly chose to do an Internship in a bilingual school, where the kids learn in both Spanish and English. My internship role included helping out with English in the classroom, talking to the students in English and helping them to speak in their second language, supervising them during activities and break times. I worked with 6-7 year olds and it was a great chance to get a feel for the education field. However, I decided to change my internship after a few weeks because I wanted to try a business related internship and I also preferred something closer to where I was living, without such a long commute.

Euroace organized a second internship with me within 2 days and so I was able to join a professional football club and look into the sports business industry, and i didn't have to waste any time before getting into a new experience. I started my internship by sitting down with the Villarreal CF supervisor and discussing my interests. I decided to focus more on a graphic design and marketing role, and some of my tasks included designing brochures, video editing for the marketing department, and designing promotional banners and materials.

My course also involved taking Spanish classes every day. This really helped me to improve my speaking and listening skills, and it gave me a good amount of time every day to communicate with people on the same level as me and feel like I could make mistakes and ask if I didn't understand something.

Something that made the program a lot easier was the structure. The internship and the classes worked perfectly together, so the timetable was easy to get used to!

I loved Valencia and especially the Turia park. You can cycle, run, or just look around and find different festivals and events going on all the time. It was a great city, not too big, and with nice weather to enjoy being outside!

First of all, I'm a French Canadian Master Student who needed to do an internship to graduate. Being an International Business Major, I thought to myself "Why not do one abroad, it would be a great experience".
Since I already did an exchange in Asia, I wanted to see how it is to live in Europe. I chose Valencia because the program was really affordable with good reviews and had a program related to international business. It was a country which I've already visited although a new city. I could also learn Spanish by the same time which is really useful seeing the number of Spanish speaking countries.
The program staff was really supportive before and throughout the internship. The same can be said for the company employees hosting me. It was a travel agency located in the marina in a open space startup incubator/accelerator. It specialized in tours in South America with customers from all over the world.
I lived with a host family to learn more about the culture. Some other students/interns came and left during my time there so it was a great way to meet people from other countries.
All in all, it was a great experience which I would recommend to others greatly.