Johanna Molina co-founder of The Intern Group visited Delonia’s headquarters in Madrid in September 2023, accompanied by Lalita Benavides (Spain Manager), and representatives from several universities in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom. The Intern Group is a company specialized in offering students international experiences as interns in consolidated companies. An effective way to take the first steps in the working world, as well as to learn what it is like to live, study and work abroad.
International dimension
Jose María Corsino founding partner and partner of Delonia, explained that: “We have been working with The Intern Group for several years, we have had interns such as Alexa McPhee y Yuming Hu. We are a software company but we also do a lot of other things, like marketing. Delonia has an international perspective, both in terms of our staff, as we have people from Venezuela, Russia, India, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Philippines… In addition, we work with companies from Denmark, Luxembourg, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany… In terms of interns, they have come to us from several countries, Canada, United States, China, Emirates, Pakistan, Australia and Qatar, among others. Here students experience working for a small company. We strive to involve interns in real projects and to ensure that they leave with as close an experience as possible to what it is like to work in the real world. At Delonia, interns do not bring coffee, but participate as part of the company’s projects.”
To the question of what requirements a student needs to be a Delonia scholarship holder, José María Corsino answered: “For us, the curriculum is not the most important thing; we approach selection in a flexible manner. The most important quality is motivation and desire. We prefer someone with less training but more desire. In reality, we don’t help our interns, they help themselves. Sometimes, something as simple as knowing how to use Excel can be the first step to end up managing data. As important as the professional work is to take advantage of the experience of living abroad. Therefore, they have Fridays free to devote to other activities.”
“I have been doing this for 20 years and I think I know how to manage the members of the company. Sometimes interns arrive who are very fragile, we try to teach them that conflicts are inevitable and help you grow. We are very careful that no one in our team suffers any kind of excess, especially from a customer.” continued José María Corsino.
First steps in the labor market
“We try to make young people look to the future and strive to help them grow as individuals. When you’re young sometimes you don’t realize that you won’t be 20 all your life. You have to make a life plan, nowadays many people live ‘to the day’, even in thrifty cultures like the Chinese one” concluded José María Corsino.
The Delonia team is very proud that the interns who have done internships with the company, the vast majority of them have told The Intern Group how much they learned from the experience. And in some way we believe we have contributed to facilitating their first steps in the labor market, which is the ultimate goal of this type of scholarship program.
We end up repeating the phrase that our interns are not an accessory and that they are not there to bring coffee but to get involved in the company’s projects and also in the company’s parties, because life is much more than work. In addition, we have always encouraged them to discover the Spanish culture, from its culinary richness, to its language (spoken by almost 500 million), to its joyful way of life.
