Summer Abroad with GRIP

Student Reflection by Ava Strong (C’27 W’27, Spanish target)

 

This summer, I interned with Fundación Liderazgos y Organizaciones Responsables (FLOR) as a general assistant in Buenos Aires, Argentina through Penn Abroad’s Global Research & Internship Program (GRIP). Fundación FLOR is a non-profit organization that promotes the formation and transformation of responsible leaders to build more sustainable, diverse, inclusive, and equitable organizations. I worked mainly on their annual awards ceremony called Premios FLOR, or “FLOR Awards” which recognizes organizations located in Latin America and abroad who have demonstrated high gender, age, racial and functional diversity into their leadership structures in the past year. In conjunction with another intern, I helped track and analyze over 65 applications by large companies, non-profit organizations, small businesses, and international organizations. I created a database to track the applications of companies who applied for two or more years to see their progress in the diversity sphere, as well as helped create a spreadsheet containing every question from every 2024 application with a color-coded key to aid the judges in their data analysis. I corresponded with applicants who were missing any information from their application and tracked each application’s status daily.  

The theme of the Buenos Aires GRIP program is Social Impact. I have always had a passion for service and social impact, and I was looking for a way to strengthen my hard, quantitative skills while making a tangible positive impact in my internship. I definitely found that this summer, though it took a bit of a different form from what I was expecting. I initially wanted to do something pertaining to law, but because of the placement process for GRIP, I was placed into a more business-inclined internship. I still learned a lot about workplace culture, communication, and professionalism while also learning more hard skills like certain skills within Excel while improving my Spanish. Though I was not 100% sure what I would be doing before I started my internship, I found it overall to be a rewarding experience.

I gained an increased sense of autonomy at my internship this summer. Given that I was personally responsible for the success and efficiency of that stage of the awards, I felt very connected to the mission of my organization and that helped motivate me to do my best work diligently. This led me to, over time, begin making decisions without the direct input of my supervisor. I became more confident responding to individual situations and questions from applicants how I thought was best, and it overall made me a more efficient worker. Though I made mistakes, I was quick to remedy them and without the help of my supervisor, so in this way, I became a lot quicker thinking on my feet. I also realized how well I respond to feeling personally invested in a task or experience and I will keep that in mind when selecting my courses, engaging within the Huntsman program in both an academic and an extracurricular capacity, and choosing a career path. I also learned how to clean up data a lot quicker than I could before, which will be helpful in future quantitative classes as well as in my job someday, I am sure. My Spanish also improved drastically, and I became used to finding creative ways to express myself when I didn’t know one word or another. I am excited to bring my new knowledge and language skills to my language classes and beyond.