Lenka Černáková was a community manager at Locus for almost a year, and we’re very happy to announce that she came back this summer!
Lenka recently shared her personal experience of what it’s like to work and be a part of a coworking space, writing a guest blog post for The Global Mobile Worker, a blog about the future of work (that happens to have been created by another Locus member, the amazing Robin Terrell).
We’re reposting it here because it’s a nice story about what it’s like to work at a coworking space, and particularly at Locus, and we hope it will be useful for people thinking about doing this kind of work in the future.
Thank you, Robin, for letting us repost, and thanks most of all to you, Lenka, for sharing your story with others who might soon be in your shoes!
My Internship at Coworking Locus Workspace
Usually, the first big step before you start your career and get „the real job“ or start your own business, or decide you want to go travel the world, or start freelancing, or go get your master degree, or do whatever you want, is to try something out with an internship. If there is one thing that I learned while interning at Locus Workspace it is that the right internship/job/business doesn´t exist. You have to grab the opportunity and make it your perfect one. If you are just waiting for the right one you might wait for another year. Or ten. Or twenty. And it might never come. Waiting for the perfect opportunity is just an excuse not to do anything. Even though I was never really interested in freelancing, didn´t want to start my own business, and my background was in tourism and culture, I decided to get an internship in the coworking space.
While being an intern at a coworking space I was mostly working as a community manager, helping with day to day managing coworking space tasks, organizing events for members and the public focused on startups, business, fun stuff and my favorite topic location independent lifestyle and digital nomads. As I was still a student, I decided to use my last semester for Erasmus + internship abroad. I was also working on my master thesis Digital Nomadism in Tourism. Being at a coworking space and having access to all kind of digital nomads and people who lived location independent lifestyles helped a lot. I was introduced to a lot of people through members of the coworking space, and I could interview community members and used the materials in my thesis. I connected living location independently and digital nomadism as a new way of tourism, and my master thesis was awarded as the second best thesis written in tourism in Czechia in 2016 by the national body of tourism in Czechia – Czech Tourism.
For me, it was also a chance to meet and work with people from different backgrounds that challenged me, questioned me, taught me how to genuinely say sorry when I f*cked up, how to be assertive, how to stand behind my opinions even though no one else agreed. I was surely not being micromanaged, so I had to be able to make decisions on my own and learn how to make the right ones. I learned a lot about what I like and what I don´t, what are my weaknesses and what I want to focus on in the future.
What I enjoyed the most was definitely that I worked with people that had skills I admired. I always wanted to learn Spanish but never took classes. One of the members of the coworking space was Spanish and he would always find 30 minutes for our Spanish mini coffee break. After a year I am able to have the conversation in the language I always wanted to speak. I joined another member on his morning cross country runs in the forest at 7 am two – three times a week, even though I am not a morning person and I don´t like waking up early. I met a great couple from Gran Canaria and when I went there for holiday they showed me the whole island, took me for hikes and I tried the food in local restaurants. I remember talking to another member about what is the difference between working in a small company or startup and big corporate one. He said: „You can either be a small fish in a big bowl or big fish in a small bowl. Both are fine and have pluses and minuses and it is only up to you which one is your perfect one.“ There are hundreds of stories I have with people I met at Locus. I realized that being surrounded by people who were hard working, more talented and more experienced than me also made me a better person in a way.
It was the best opportunity I could possibly get and if I had a chance to choose again my internship would still be at a coworking space. After all, an internship is an adventure. It is a journey and rocky road, but at the end, it is only up to you if you will make it your perfect one.
Check out the position at Locus Workspace in Prague: https://en.locusworkspace.cz/internship
