Great! You really get out what you put in

I spent 8 weeks this past summer interning in Barcelona, Spain. As someone who really couldn't make study abroad work with getting two majors and two minors, this was a great alternative to that. As for my working experience, I was placed at a startup in a team of 5 and at Barcelona Tech City, a beautiful incubator space overlooking the marina and steps away from the beach. Although my liberal arts skills were not a perfect match to what their traditional candidate might have been, I was given a lot of flexibility as to what I worked on. My work ranged from UI and UX to website design to one-pagers for marketing - all things I that I had worked on in various capacities through student orgs and past internships. I really enjoyed this as an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and was able to include a lot of new skills to my background and to my resume. It was a bit on the expensive side for a program but if you can get school to help sponsor it or get a scholarship, I would absolutely recommend this to anyone with the means to do so.

I worked about 50 hours a week and really got a lot out of my experience but some of my fellow cohort members generally worked about 10 to 30 hours a week. If that's the kind of working experience you want, setting expectations early on with your boss will be key if you want more time to travel and work flexibly. I did travel almost every weekend but my bosses were very understand of my having to leave early or working longer on Monday to Thursday if I was traveling Friday. I think it also did vary widely in terms of student/boss relationship and amount of work allocated to student but the saying rings true - you get out what you put in!

As for the accomodations, you were surrounded by Americans and other foreign students traveling so it made for a young and fun atmosphere. One recommendation I have to Sage Corps is to put the whole cohort on the same floor or hallway if possible because there was about half of our program all together and the other half that were scattered through the various buildings of TSH Marina.