— by Karolína Muchová, Business Analyst Intern @Accomango
Have you ever heard of the internship obsession?
Me neither; or not until I became an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. As summer was approaching, no one failed to mention their intense two-month Nine to Five internship at a corporate firm or research institution while I was looking forward to four months of spontaneity with three goals:
- Educate myself through skill development courses
- Learn through life/work experiences
- Experience interesting encounters
I wanted the summer to become a so-called “shopping period” for all my possible interests that would help me form my path towards a specific career.
Realizing that I still had plenty of summers to spend, in what seemed to be the conventional way to do so, I decided to stick to my plan. Looking back, I am glad I did as that ultimately pushed me towards starting as an intern at Accomango ⎯ a nothing but a conventional startup that is digitizing the accommodation space for blue-collar workers.
Not only was I offered to work under the guidance of the founder of the company, learn how to market size, and create my own code for website scraping; however, for the first time, I was given a project of considerable impact as my work would be used as the basis for Accomango’s next fundraising cycle.
I would be lying if I said I was not at all intimidated by the task at hand, but for the most part, I was thrilled. This position promised to help me meet all three of my goals I set for the summer, and, by summarizing my two months of being a Mango at Accomango, I want to show you how.
Skill Development
During my first day at Accomango, I was introduced to the details of my project where I was required to deliver a marketizing model for nine separate European countries and a qualitative research report on competition and workflow.
On paper, the tasks sounded simple. The size of the market was condensed into a multiplication problem of the number of workers demanding housing, the average duration of their stay, and the average price per night per individual. However, it took me just a few hours of frustrating research to realize that the exact data I was looking for did not exist and that I had to find another way to get to the desired market value.
You see, marketizing is not about the ability to precisely research and calculate data but about the ability to tell a story through numbers. I was given complete freedom and an infinite number of paths that I could take to reach my end goal which was both intimidating and inspiring. Without an existing manual I had to go through a long trial and error process; I would find a seemingly valuable dataset that would start forming the beginning of my so-called market sizing story until I hit a dead-end, forcing me to pivot, simplify or estimate the next steps.
What is more, creating a value out of thin air for markets in different countries showed me that every culture has a specific vocabulary that would give me access to the data I was looking for. Internet dictionaries and translators were not enough and, thus I found myself engaging in a scavenger hunt for specific phrases used across global statistical bureaus by using articles, help from native speakers, and the bureaus’ customer care service as clues, teaching me additional research and communication skills.
Lastly, as a person with no background in computer science, I was taught how to create my own code for scraping websites with the help of Accomnago’s software engineer Kuba. I appreciated that he would go through the process with me step by step, explaining the theory behind every function while also letting me fight with the code on my own. It was humbling to spend four hours writing two lines of code that would still have occasional bugs. Yet, the greater the frustration the bigger the reward when I finally ran my first code with success.
Life/Work Experiences
Here I would like to highlight one specific experience that came very early on. I would even go as far to say that it was one of the turning points in my learning because it had an overarching effect on my approach to future endeavors.
I have just come up with a strategy that would, in theory, give me a persuasive number of blue-collar workers in demand of accommodation. The plan was to do so by determining the average commuting time of employed persons. Yet, after a full day of extensive research, I realized there was no way of determining the correspondence between commute duration and the demand for accommodation. Thus, the best and rational step would be to swallow my pride and think of a different approach; however, letting go proved to be surprisingly difficult. I felt like I spent too much time on this specific research for it to yield no result, preventing me from moving onto another strategy for another couple of hours.
Ending the day with zero progress I was devastated. I saw all that day’s work as a complete waste of time. However, it was this frustration that led me to realize that the only hours wasted were those that I spent on my initial idea after internally deciding that it would never work. The ones before were a part of a learning experience that taught me that there is an equivalence between the creation and elimination of ideas and that there is merit to the ability to start over.
Encounters
One’s work environment is a significant part of their overall performance. No one can thus be surprised that newcomers are always a bit nervous about entering a new social circle of coworkers and their already established traditions and rhythm.
Entering the office for the first time I felt this nervosity twice as much. You see, I am a rising Second Year Undergraduate student that has done all her last year’s internships online from the safety of her home or dorm room, needing to fully interact with her workspace for a limited time of one zoom call. Thus, on my first day I was quite intimidated. That soon proved to be quite unreasonable. Everyone seemed very excited to meet me which (and that is the most important part) never changed.
My workplace experience, however, did not only end with a daily “hi” or “see you soon”. My timing was also fortunate enough to allow me to attend Accomango’s new “office warming party”. Here I was able to meet many other coworkers that were either living outside of Prague or chose to stay remote for work. Trying to talk to as many people as possible, I was surprised by the diversity of the Accomago community. I learned about life in Spain from a colleague who spent several years there, product design from one of Accomango’s product designers, or about the transition to Prague from those living in smaller cities around the country. Thus, even such simple encounters were very rewarding.
Bittersweet goodbyes
What a ride!
With all my three summer goals fulfilled, my internship has come to an end. I would have never thought that I would learn and experience as much as I did in the last two months. I feel that I have grown both personally and professionally and made friends that I can always contact.
It was hard to say goodbye, but who knows, maybe I will be back in no time and if not I will always be grateful for everything that my internship taught me.
— by Karolína Muchová, Business Analyst Intern @Accomango
