No final de abril, o Mais Guimarães acolheu Jennifer Mayala, estudante belga envolvida no programa Erasmus. Mostramos Guimarães, mas também este “nosso mundo” do jornalismo, carreira que pretende seguir no seu país.

Para terminar, escreveu um texto sobre a cidade berço para a edição de maio da nossa revista e que agora partilhamos por aqui.

My name is Jennifer Mayala I am in my last school year, I study secretarial languages at Go Next Level X in Belgium in a city named Hasselt. Through Erasmus, I and many other students got the chance to do an internship abroad Europe.

I got the chance to do my internship here at Mais Guimarães. This is a dream that came true because I will study journalism next year in university. Because of this I got the perfect chance to see how it really works in this sector.

On our first day in Guimarães, I visited the school Francisco de Holanda with the other Erasmus students. We were guided around the building the students are very creative and there were beautiful artworks all over the school. I also liked their concept of inclusiveness because even children with disabilities are in aloud at this school nobody is excluded. In Belgium, children with disabilities have to be in a special school and usually there is a shortage of these kind of schools parents struggle to find a school place for their children. While here everyone is just together, and I think that’s also better because you also learn to get along with each other that way. The next day, we went to visit the Guimarães castle. I learnt a lot about the city’s history.

After all our visits I started my internship in Mais Guimarães a newspaper/magazine company. They have a small team, but they work very hard and I am very grateful that I could work in this company the employees are very friendly they made me feel at home. I was able to see how they work here and learnt a lot. It was very inte- resting because I got the chance to try everything out. I had the opportunity to take photos and help with editing. I could show my creativity and help prepare for interview questions.

One of the best moments was being able to follow a press conference, despite not being able to understand the language it was fun to see how it works behind the scenes. I also interviewed some tourists in the city – it was my first time that I had interviewed people this way. It was very fun because you don’t know what to expect some people are ready to answer some questions and don’t mind being on camera and some don’t.

I am going to miss it a lot here because the people here at work are so great, we have nice conversations and I have learned a lot from it I got tips that I can use for later. The people from Mais Guimarães really don’t ignore you. They helped me a lot and if I had the chance to do an internship abroad I would do it again in this company. Hopefully I will be fluent in Portuguese by that time. I’ve always been sure about that I want to study journalism next year in university and this experience doesn’t make me hesitate.