So my internship: It's really, really good. It's also different than what I'd envisioned in a couple ways, most notably the amount of technical work I'm doing. I remember Adelante warning me specifically about this during my phone interview when I mentioned that I was competent with building websites and computer-based graphic design. I was warned, "If you let them know that you're good at web work, that's probably most of what you'll be doing," and that prophecy has come true. They did ask what my web/design skills were, I told them, and now I've built a website from scratch for one of the firm's sister companies and am totally redesigning/reprogramming my intern company's existing website, as well as reworking the sister company's logo and drawing up company look-and-feel guides, color schemes, and master presentation templates in PowerPoint. They seem thrilled with the work so far, so that's fun, and it should be great experience to talk about down the road. It's also very useful for them, since they don't have anybody in their office who can do that kind of work (especially the web stuff, which they have had to contract out in the past). I am being given lots of responsibility and trust and that's wonderful.
On the other hand, we've barely talked about the actual work of setting up wind farms and photovoltaic facilities, which I'm also curious about and was thinking we'd deal with more. Their daily work isn't always full of this, to be fair, and the financial auditors have been around for the past few weeks, so there hasn't been that much talk about renewable energy projects. I need to ask them more questions, overall, and I'm slowly gaining confidence in Spanish to be able to do that. My Spanish level (especially when I arrived, and still somewhat now) is too low to be able to participate meaningfully in technical or policy discussions with native Spanish speakers, though I can converse pretty easily about the design work I'm doing at the moment and lighter topics of conversation.
The bottom line is that I would like, in a way, to be doing more policy work, but also feel like my internship has worked out wonderfully exactly how it is. My focus at the moment should be gaining enough Spanish experience so I can participate in the types of discussions I want to be a part of and ask the questions that will lead me there.
Andy P, Golden Valley, MN