New York internship summary
So far so good. I can’t complain and except all my friends and family that I’m missing, this is still the dream ‘job’ I always wanted! As well as the City, as the people, as the internship itself! I’ve created a small summary of my adventures for you.
The daily life
I’m living here for almost two months now and despite I really love the city life, I can’t afford the ‘real’ New York lifestyle. Stopping by a coffee shop in the morning, going out for lunch, have dinner delivered and grabbing a few drinks every day is too much for me. I knew New York would be an expensive experience but it still surprised me. So I’m started cooking for myself every evening and I’m packing my lunch to work. I also invested in a bike! I really love my bike and this month I only spend around $15 on public transport. Instead of the $172 for an unlimited MTA card. Having a bike in the city also helps me exploring the city and navigating from one point to another. Because I can’t bike and watching the GPS at the same time in this crazy city…
During my stay I’ve already received some surprising visits of my friends. One night my roommate knocked at my door to tell me there was a ‘wrong food delivery’ at the door. I needed to tell them to go away. When I opened the door there were two Belgian friends in front of the door. The surprise visit did work out very well. They stayed for a week and a few days later my sister had a flight-transfer in New York. She was going home from her holidays in Colombia and Panama and we managed to have a quick meeting in the city.
Next week I will have two other friends visiting me as well and during the first two weeks of April I’ll be full-booked too. From friends and the AFT Student group.
The city
As you can guess, there is a lot to do in the city. In my first month I visited the One Trade Center, completed the full Central Park tour, did the museum of the city of new York, took a ferry to Staten Island. Which gives you a nice skyline over the city and a view on the Statue of Liberty. I watched my first broadway show too, The Lion King. Which was phenomenal. Tickets go out around the $200, but I won cheap tickets and went with my roommate for only $30 per person.
Besides all the actual attractions, there are a lot of bars and restaurants that offer unique experiences too. Offering free pizza during happy hour, a bar that’s a barbershop during the day and becomes a bar during the night. Live music bars or pubs you can only enter if you go through an underground hot-dog bar first. This week I found a bar you can only enter if you enter a fast-food restaurant ‘Five Guys’ first. Most bars do happy hours every day, till around 8pm, and start new ‘cheap’ actions at midnight. Not all happy hours are the same though. Some give out free shots, offer beers at a cheaper price or offer 2 drinks for the price of 1. Who knows which specials I will find this month…
The internship
As I’m getting along with the daily routine and my tasks in the company, the hardest thing for me to get used to is still the change from an azerty-keyboard to a qwerty one… Maybe for ‘normal’ people, this is not so hard to get used to, but believe me as I tell you that it’s extremely hard for programmers. Not only the special characters are completely different, but also the short-codes are a nightmare. For example: ‘cmd + a’ is switched with ‘cmd + q’. So if I want to select all the text on a page, I casual close the whole program I was using instead. And so it goes with many, many short codes…
I still really like what I do at my work. All the colleagues are very friendly, helpful and lots of fun. The free beers at the office are still a fact and the WeWork office where we are based still organizes small weekly events. Such as happy hours with home-made cocktails, Cupcakes parties or a s’more event with dress code.
In my first one and a half month I learned so much already. Most new and advanced things about my work of course. But going out and living alone in a big city like New York gives you some nice life lessons too. You need to drop a little of your kindness and shyness and you can be shameless too thanks to the high amount of weird people here. I’m still working on the last part ?