My name is Irina Costea and I arrived for my Erasmus experience on the 24th of January, 2025. The experience is going good, I am still in the process of adapting, building personal routines around my new life and creating my own systems because there are a lot of things to put in order, ideas to implement, while still keeping the workflow of some other tasks, such as social media, that needs to be taken care of daily. So I’d say it’s a mix of following a pattern, while bringing innovation to it, while also trying to come up with proactive ideas and meanwhile, if there is still time, to live the island life. I never stayed in a coliving before, although I felt very connected to them and I joined some activities, it is my first time actually staying in a big house with so many people and it almost feels overwhelming every day. Sometimes I feel so tired by my tasks and my personal projects and living there and bumping into people all day that I end up not joining the group activities. Precisely because I am staying there with them the whole time.
But I will move in another room at the beginning of March and I will see how I feel. But I am totally considering the option to have my own place if it keeps being draining. And then come every week and have my meetings with Maria, join family dinner (I understand it’s kind of mandatory), etc. I am an introvert that has excellent communication capacities, so people often confuse me with an extrovert. But I think it’s all in the balance.
Regarding my relationship with Maria, I think we as people vibe together very well, we have a good connection, sometimes we might have different visions and I understand, because my own vision rarely aligns with someone in the sense that I can have the tendency to “modernize” old processes and propose more and diverse solutions and people, especially entrepreneurs that are used to do some things in a certain way can integrate these changes really slow or maybe not at all. Or feel resistance in the beginning. And so I feel because of this I sometimes find myself in an executing position and I’m not used to it. In all my previous projects I was a leader and guided the change, the team, gave indications, so my way of being is definitely not focused on receiving tasks from others, but implementing my systems, checking results, seeing how we can move forward. But I totally understand that I also need to maintain some things as they are right now in order not to be completely disruptive to the public.
There are so many things that I’m learning and I like, but some I don’t think I want to do further. What I really noticed that I like is organizing workshops, it’s quite exciting, I already organized 2 workshops and now I’m thinking to build the 3rd. And I love building large-scale strategies for the brand to flourish in the future, but I don’t really like implementing myself because sometimes it gets a lot for my neurodivergent to handle all the tasks from point a to point z and I’m very good at delegating things, for sure! It’s very interesting to do all these marketing tasks for a coliving, it’s insane how much work is behind a fun looking atmosphere and Maria for sure is a courageous entrepreneur to venture like that into a business that has to do a lot with people, the emotional side of humans, administrating a whole house and being ready to solve every little thing that might go wrong.
