Le internship and life lessons from Paris

Playing scrabble during a day in the French countryside with "mes personnes âgées" 

The internship that I took part in was a really amazing experience. Sounds cheesy, I know, but it is so true. At the beginning I found it really difficult to go to retirement homes because the loneliness of the residents really affected me and actually made me quite sad. It was something new, and it took some time to get used to. After some time it became something that I looked forward to, a time that I could spend with someone in need and hopefully brighten their day in the process. It also made me so much more comfortable with my language skills than I was before I got there. Talking with people was now a piece of cake. Sure there was and still is vocabulary that I didn't know or some verb tenses that got me all sorts of confused, but in the grand scheme of things I was definitely feeling a lot more confident in my language abilities.

Enjoying a fun time with some stickers and Samia, aka coolest lady to work with ever!

I also learned to interact and work with people that I wouldn't normally gravitate towards in my every day life back in Provo. I had to learn very quickly to work with people that had very different personalities from my own, and I needed to adapt and be able to work with each of those people and create effective relationships. I am grateful that I was able to learn this skill early on and that I have a personality that can work well with so many different people (hopefully that doesn't sound too braggy of me).