First week at Salgado

 

Hello again from Salgado’s newest praktikant, Helen, coming to you from the end of my first week!

But this wasn’t just my first week at Salgado – it was actually my first experience of a Swedish workplace.

language barrier

Before I started, I had been really worried about the language barrier. Keeping up with a conversation in Swedish, between native Swedish speakers, has always been a big challenge for me.

Pay close attention to the next conversation you have with a friend or work colleague and you’ll see why! You might notice that you do things like let your sentences trail off unfinished, interrupt one another, and rely on unspoken assumptions – not to mention using metaphors or slang. We all do it (I know I do when I’m talking to other English speakers) but it can make things tricky for anyone who is less than fluent.

So naturally I was a bit nervous to start the week by joining a Monday morning catch-up meeting with the whole team. My Swedish was put even further to the test on Tuesday when I sat in on a statistical reporting meeting with a key client.

In the end, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I understood. While some of the fine details went over my head, I found I could keep up with the gist of most discussions.

Outside of meetings, my colleagues at Salgado decided to take things in English for my first week to help me settle in, which obviously made things a lot easier! However, it’s really important to me to keep improving my Swedish – and hopefully my praktik here will help me to do that.

I’ll be posting a short update every Friday, so stay tuned – and maybe by the end of my 12 weeks here I’ll be writing to you in Swedish!

Until next time,

Helen