GRIP, Internships Abroad Overcoming Challenges

Jonathan and Co Capital - Sydney, Australia 

After being a financial analyst intern at Jonathan and Co Capital for a month, I’ve been able to realize the significant progress I’ve made against the three biggest challenges I faced at the start of my internship.

Settling into work at the beginning of June, I soon found myself facing three main challenges: overcoming cultural and linguistic differences, adjusting to a more analytical way of writing, and staying self-motivated.

Not only were there various cultural differences between the work culture I had grown accustomed to in America and the new work culture I was facing in Sydney, but there were linguistic barriers I now had to overcome as well,

My company’s weekly 2-hour long training sessions were all in Chinese, and much of the mentoring feedback I got back from my supervisor was in Chinese as well. Now, my grasp of Chinese is good enough for me to carry out my internship duties fully, but the task of conducting so much of my internship in a language I wasn’t as familiar with still felt daunting. 

I eventually realized that as long as I put in extra work, always choosing to be actively engaged, I could go above and beyond expectations. I would set aside time to go over the Chinese slide decks given before the training sessions, ensuring that I was able to fully understand as much as possible before they started. I worked on expanding my business vocabulary in Chinese, slowly noting down the characters for complex banking terms.

As I improved my Chinese comprehension, I was also working on improving my analytical writing abilities. At the start of my internship, my first few articles required multiple rounds of drafts, as I was just not able to grasp how to write like an analyst.

But with consistent feedback from my supervisor, learning how to give my analytical opinion in my articles slowly became more of an intuitive process. And my most recent article only needed one round of review before it was published.

Finally, I’ve been strengthening my self-discipline skills since the start of my internship. At the beginning of the summer, it was hard for me to set aside time to work every day, especially since I was working more or less on a freelancer schedule. But I realized that if I didn’t have a set schedule, I wouldn’t be able to focus on not just writing and editing articles, but also the other work like reviewing the training decks and strengthening my Chinese. So I made a conscious effort to start and end work at set times every day.

Halfway through my internship, I feel that I’ve made significant progress towards overcoming my main challenges of facing linguistic differences, learning analytical writing, and building self-motivation.