Ana Carmen Gutiérrez, with her fellow students. PHOTO: loaned

"Doing an internship abroad allows you to get to know other cultures and new people, practice languages, and learn other ways of building". Ana Carmen Gutiérrez thus encourages other students at the University of Navarra's School of Architecture to look abroad for their first professional opportunities.

This is what she did when in the summer of the fourth quarter of degree program she collaborated for a month and a half at Architectuurstudio HH in Amsterdam. "I sent an e-mail with my curriculum to all of the world-renowned programs of study that interested me, and I was very lucky; I got a reply from Herman Hertzberger, an almost 80-year-old architect who was part of Dutch architecture, and who had been close to Aldo van Eyck," she explains.

I was saving up for the whole course," he adds, "so that when it came time to ask for work, it wouldn't be a disadvantage not to be paid. In fact, I think that making it clear that I didn't mind not being paid put me ahead of other candidates".

And in the fifth year, he repeated the experience from July to October: "Returning to the same studio gave me a little more confidence to get by, and I was able to take advantage of the triple".

As he admits, going abroad was never his first choice:"My goal was to see with my own eyes what the working world was like, to work as an architect. I wanted to see how I could develop myself at work; I didn't care if I did it in Spain or abroad, but only if it was a good studio, where I could really learn".

Ana Carmen recognizes herself fortunate to have worked in different fields: she has been on site visits, helped in competitions, witnessed the first phases of project... She also collaborated in some interior design project , in programs of study organizing the program of a major project , and in issues related to images and computer graphics. But what he enjoyed most were the trips to see architecture in Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France.

"I like to think that I've used the summer to keep learning," she says emphatically. "At first I was worried about dedicating all my vacation time to work, but being in a foreign country, meeting new places and new people makes you financial aid take it like a vacation. If you organize yourself well, there's time for everything".

Regarding the management of the internship, he says that "you have to be smart and move as soon as possible. At the end of the day, and although it sometimes seems the opposite, the internship period is there for us to make the most of it, and that depends on how much enthusiasm you put into it".