Internship at Vallée Sud Grand Paris

In order to complete my master degree course, it is required that we complete a 3-months internship in a company. So in September 2020, thanks to a friend of mine, I got the opportunity to work in a governmental organisation, Vallée Sud Grand Paris. Unlike last time, this one is a real internship with a contract! How exciting to finally have a real professional experience somewhere, I have been dreaming about it since the beginning of my business studies.

Planning the working schedule had been however complicated. The idea was to continue dancing full-time at the Opera while doing this internship part-time. We decided that I work mostly distantly, doing mostly research about vending machines (yes, vending machines!). I was once worried by the idea of doing both dancing and internship at the same time and wondered whether it is a little too ambitious. But I really wanted to try a real internship.

Three months later, it is finally done! Just last week the internship at Vallée Sud officially ended. I am completely conscious that the experience of working from home is very far from that of an average office job. The ever-changing situation of coronavirus also affected the progression of my internship, since whenever there were new measures announced by the government, it is very normal that vending machines suddenly are not the priority for a public organisation. But…. at least I can say that I did it! And, working from home is in a way the “new normal” isn’t it?

Never stop learning…

As you might have read from my last blog posts, live performances are not allowed in France at least until 7th January 2021. According to some rumours, theatres will most probably remain closed even after this date in France. What an incredible year! which gives us plenty of extra free time. Instead of feeling unhappy and just sit there waiting, we dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet must admit that we are super fortunate to still be paid and to keep our job. We continue rehearsing quite intensively for the upcoming (or not) performances. I myself am enjoying my extra free time learning different things, mostly about investment for the moment, as my master thesis will be about Financial Literacy in young adults/athletes.

There are debates about focusing all our efforts and energy in only ONE thing (as suggested by Gary Keller in his famous book) or doing several things at the same time. I realised that in my life I have always been having different focuses at once. Perhaps and most probably each person is different and we should not try to find one way of thinking/doing that could apply to everyone?

Anyway, no matter where we are in the world, instead of being bored and having the feeling that we have wasted an entire year due to the lockdowns everywhere in 2020, I find that information and knowledge have never been so accessible ! With internet we can read, learn and watch pretty much everything. I also discovered this audio-book service by Amazon called Audible (https://www.audible.fr) which allows you to listen to so many audiobooks, for a very reasonable monthly subscription fee. If we are curious and passionate, how can we be bored in 2020?