In Poland: The Start of a Wannabe Future Global Player

Why internship abroad?

During my last years of university, I spent almost every day searching for something. I thought the anxiety was about finding a summer job or the prospect of scoring a permanent position in an IT company. All of my friends and classmates were doing that. They attended on-campus job fairs, visited career center and slipped résumés to Cisco, Microsoft, HP and other known IT companies every new graduate wanted boast as his employer. I did the same. I churned out draft after draft of résumé, tagged along with my friends to those job fairs and went on interviews saying how I loved to work for the potential employers. Behind closed door, I admitted to myself that I had no idea what I was looking for. I didn’t want to find a job with HP to improve on my technical skills and apply my academic knowledge in a practical working environment. I didn’t want to grow professionally in Cisco’s corporation environment. I didn’t imagine holding a master degree five years from now. But I said all of that because that was what people were writing and saying at the time.

For some reason, I thought I needed global skills.

I pondered if it counted that I was an Asian immigrant and had first-hand experience living and working in a third-world country which was my homeland. I did mention it on a few occasions. This probably explained why I never heard back from the recruiters when applied for jobs requiring strong ‘global skills’ and ‘ability to work in a multi-cultural environment.’ I couldn’t explain then what was it that made me gung-ho about being a global player. I thought maybe if I went abroad again, I could use it to broaden my global perspective.

I was shy and didn’t know how to use school resources and counselors to my benefit. I relied mostly on my solitary online search, typing “internship abroad”, “working abroad” and a few other variations. I considered working in bars and restaurants in the UK or picking fruits and tended sheep in Australia, but those ideas at the time didn’t appeal to me because I was still ‘conventional’. I thought if I were going to ‘waste’ a whole year, I should do something which I could put on my résumé. The more technical the job is, the better. Otherwise, how would I explain to my future employer about my year gap or convince them I would be their best option for a software engineer position after spending the last year washing glasses and cleaning sheep’s manure.

Fortunately, I found IAESTE, an international organization that organizes and sends students abroad on technical internships. One of the first few matches was to work in a startup company in Gliwice, Poland. Intrigued, I accepted immediately.

The IT crowd

My company is small startup which develops software applications for clients from richer countries. The working environment was similar to any tech environment in US companies. There were many twenty-something guys who forgot to shave their beards, ate at desks and sometimes out of frustration wrote obscene Polish texts to commenting the source code (on the pretext that clients check only product and not code, and even if they do, they wouldn’t understand it.) I was the only foreigner and one of two females working with 20 male colleagues, thus couldn’t complain about the extra attention I received.

It was here that I learned first-hand about outsourcing, how cheap and easy it was to do so. All started by Marek, a co-worker, who in one late evening told me I could freely call my parents in the US from the company phones. “But it is expensive.” I protested. “Nah, these are IP phones. It’s very cheap to call over the Internet. We’ve already paid a fixed rate.” He reassured. “Oh, so it doesn’t cost $1/minute like calling long-distance from a home phone?” I thought to myself. I was helping with one project, developing banking applications for a client in the US. My co-worker had frequent calls with the customer over these cheap IP phones. I met the client once when he flew here to meet the team and check up on the work. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the reason for outsourcing. For a month salary paying local software engineers in New Jersey, New York where the client lived, he could gather up a team of at least 15 Polish and even more from this little, dusty town nobody had ever heard of.

The US doesn’t outsource IT jobs only to India but to other places where the price tags are cheaper. And they are not the only one. Western Europe outsources to cheaper Eastern Europe where wages fall at least by half. This model is going be the future model for IT. The world is indeed flat. Thomas Friedman was right. I could feel it here in Poland.

Gliwice

My company wasn’t in Warsaw, Krakow or any city you might hear of. Instead, I spent three months working in Gliwice, a small industrial city to the south of Krakow. It is a typical Eastern European city with old buildings, Gothic churches, and many Soviets-style apartment blocks. If I visit there now, I will think it is ugly, but Gliwice was the first European city that I lived, and it was very beautiful for me. The only historical significance about Gliwice that might interest you is that an incident happened in this city triggered World War II. In 1939, The German SS, dressed as Polish resistance fighters, attacked the German radio station. The Nazi used this pretext to invade Poland, one of the first acts of the war. This is probably the only interesting thing that Gliwice offers to an outsider.

IAESTE Gliwice

The IAESTE trainees live in a student dormitory of the Silesian University Technology. I was one of the first trainees who arrived and one of the last to leave thus had the opportunity to meet everyone. Our floor became the headquarter of the student European Union that summer. Other than four Americans (American, Brazilian, Canadian and Ecuador), the rest were from Europe (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine and of course the local IAESTE Poland.) In the morning, we knocked on doors screaming for the others to get up before splitting up to go to work. Most of us worked in the city. Some walked, some biked and some took buses. The turmoil returned in evening when everybody came back from work. We walked from doors to doors chitchatting with the neighbors, cooked quick meals and usually went out.

The IAESTE Gliwice members did an excellent job in making our stay memorable. I can’t mention each of them here because all Poles seem to have name like Ana, Maria, Kajta, Marcin, Tomek, Lucas and Michal. There was always something for us to do. Almost every weekend, we went on trips to explore Poland. We went to the royal city of Krakow where Pope John Paul II lived during most of his adulthood before his rise to the Papacy. We visited Auschwitz concentration camp and forced to confront the horrors of war. We saw the re-constructed Old Town and the former Jewish ghetto of Warsaw. We hiked to Tatra mountains. We walked through the forests in Wisla in darkness just to greet the sunrise. We crossed to the border Czech town of Cesky Tesin to ‘smuggled’ Absinth, illegal alchohol in Poland. We did many other things but after too much potato, sausages, beer and Vodka, I forgot most of it.

The future global player

I came home and added a short paragraph to my résumé explaining my global skills, “I have worked in a startup in Poland where I was the only foreigner… got involved with an international student group from all over Europe… and…”

My future employers probably didn’t care about it and neither did I.

The global-skill objective I wanted to achieve was no longer relevant. What mattered was I met and made friends with the people I still keep in touch until this day. We have met in each other’s country or wherever we happened to be at the time, thanks to the compact and mobility of Europe.

I have traveled to many other countries in Europe now, and the more countries I visit, the less I feel any sense of adventure and discovery. I miss the first-time nervousness on the day I stepped outside an old, rusty, local train in Gliwice and tried to find my way to the university. I miss standing in front of total strangers and sheepishly introducing myself, “Hello! My name is Cindy. I’ve just got here.”

6/2004