The first day at a new job is always challenging — new responsibilities, new work processes, a new office culture. Now imagine this job is 4,300 miles from your hometown.
For Michael Lee, an honors finance and international business student at Terry College of Business, his summer internship at Debe Haber Asociaciones in Madrid carried the weight of his first office job — plus the added excitement of traveling the first time by himself.
“I’ve been studying Spanish since sixth grade,” Lee said. “I’ve always had a love for traveling, like exploring other places, getting outside my comfort zone.”
Lee’s experience was made possible by the Terry College Office of International Programs’ Spanish internship program. The program, which launched in the summer of 2025, brings a cohort of Terry College students to Madrid for six weeks. While students live together in a dorm environment and can choose to travel together on weekends, each student is paired with a separate company in Madrid for an internship.
Lee was paired with a consulting firm specializing in nonprofits. The firm’s job was to provide business advice to keep those associations running in a sustainable way. The business has served more than 1,000 nonprofits since its founding, and there was a lot to do when Lee arrived.
“They pretty much treated me like a new employee,” Lee said.
He spent his days expanding his conversational Spanish skills to cover business communication and helping nonprofits with financial analysis projects.
The language barrier was the most challenging part, but it’s also where Lee grew the most. Taking middle and high school Spanish, he could converse with his colleagues, but business communication was new.
“I don’t think my Spanish was good enough to hop on a phone call or video call with a client,” he said. “But, if I stayed another one or two weeks, I would have been able to do client-facing stuff. I mean, that’s how fast I felt like I picked up the language.
Knowing Spanish isn’t a prerequisite for the internship program, Lee said, but he was glad he arrived with conversational Spanish.
On the weekends, he and fellow UGA students travelled around Spain and saw the sights on their own.
“We all organized the trips ourselves, which for a lot of us was our first time independently organizing our travel,” Lee said. “We had to figure out where we are going to sleep? How are we going to get there? And I think the fact that we were able to pull that off, have a good time, and not have any mishaps, made me feel a lot more confident in my abilities. I thought, ‘If I can do this in another country by myself, then I can come back to the States and do it perfectly.”
While Lee hasn’t made plans to work outside the country after graduation or pursue another international internship, this summer has helped him build his confidence for whatever comes next.
“If I had just done the internship in the States, I would have learned a lot but definitely would not have experienced as much personal growth as I did going abroad,” Lee said. “You’re dealing with learning another language, another culture — you have so much to learn and so much to explore.”