Author: Casey Campbell Major: Accounting

In Valencia, Spain, I worked for Barissta, a young start-up company for 8 weeks. It’s an app that offers an online platform for independent specialty coffee shops to compete with large chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. The team is small, and although everyone offers their own talents and areas of expertise, we often all work together on big projects for the optimal outcome. As an accounting major, I had anticipated on working solely with the accounting department. I couldn’t be more wrong. In the beginning of my internship, I worked mainly in the marketing and international business team. I spent most of my days trying to establish new business partnerships, opening new markets, and researching the best marketing tactics for our type of business model. Having not even taken the introductory marketing classes at Walton yet, I was terrified to be apart of this team. However, due to working closely with other interns majoring in marketing and researching effective plans, I was able to pitch ideas and implement new marketing strategies.  

Half way through my internship, I was transferred into the accounting department. This ended up being even more challenging than working in a field I was completely unfamiliar with. It honestly never crossed my mind that all of their excel spreadsheets, their documents, and their information would be entirely in Spanish. Obviously, I should have expected this as I am interning in Spain, I simply didn’t foresee this as an issue. My first assignment was to create a five year projection plan for Barissta. As a company only open for a year, they did not have much access to information that I needed to make this task an easy assignment. I had to do extensive amounts of research, as even the head of their accounting department wasn’t an accounting major (and slightly hates the subject); he was just the only one with experience. I was able to practice my technical skills with excel but, more importantly, I exercised my problem solving skills, persistence, and determination to achieve difficult tasks.  

This international internship has been such an incredible experience and I developed many important soft skills and personality characteristics that are just as important as technical skills in the workforce. The technical skills I can learn in a classroom setting while my internship developed characteristics I otherwise could not have achieved. I have progressed in my passion for accounting, travel and the Spanish language. In the years to come, I hope to get another internship in the United States to further progress in my technical abilities for accounting. After the second internship experience, I hope to have the opportunity to travel more and conduct business abroad with a company in the United States. I wish to continue learning Spanish and increasing my fluency. To achieve this goal, I hope to return to Spain or conduct business in South America to practice the language more.