Having arrived at From The Bench in the heat of the summer, I expected nothing less than a team eager to be away with their day of work and ready to hit the beaches. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. From the first day, everybody was super-welcoming and friendly and propelled towards a mutual vision. I had seen a feasible idea, a consistent plan and a strong-will to carry it out as thoroughly as possible.

I was greeted on the first day by friendly Pablo, head of HR. I was shown the ropes and integrated into my ‘Support and Localisation’ team quickly. Having seated me next to an American and a Spanish native I   had the opportunity to test out my newfound Hispanic linguistic ability as well as interacting in a more familiar way about work and life in Spain with my colleague from the US. Well played Pablo, well played.

In terms of the workload, there was always help. Be it from a team member, marketing or content personnel. You name it. The work was explained so that in a couple of weeks independent work was possible and need for consultancy was minimal. Anyway, issues could be cleared up using our team collaboration platform, Slack. Inter-team communication was efficient and programmes were straight forward to run. Altogether, smooth sailing for an intern.

During my 5 months at From The Bench I reached a proficient level with programmes such as JIRA, SDL Trados, Google Chrome and Zendesk which all furthered my skills in the area of translation and customer support. These were easy to use and had brilliant user interface (especially Zendesk) which made my job that much easier in addition to outlying in detail the time in hours taken to resolve customer issues and how satisfied each customer was with the support they received.

When all was said and done in early December, I was left with nothing but praise for the whole FTB Team. There was respect, recognition and relationships built throughout the company regardless of position and stature. Indeed, that was what astounded me the most. The willingness of the next person to ease my job as an intern and to welcome me as a visitor to their incredible country. Thanks From The Bench and keep up the amazing project…