I am Miriam and I graduated from the University of Sheffield having studied Linguistics and Hispanic Studies. I have been dancing all my life as a hobby and was really interested in somehow incorporating this hobby into a future venture. The marketing and advertising industry also really interests me as I am fascinated by language and linguistics and how people perceive languages. Therefore, I found a small, independent dancing school in Valencia, Spain that could show me the ropes in how to market, advertise and run a dancing school. My exchange period is 1.5 months in which time I hope to learn a lot of new skills and really integrate myself into Valencian culture. I arrived on 10th September and hope to stay until 31st October.
I decided to participate in EYE after a friend decided to and enjoyed it. I had also toyed with the idea of opening my own dancing school before and didn’t really know where to start. EYE seemed a perfect opportunity to see firsthand how to run a dancing school in order to get some ideas about how to set my own up. I also really wanted to return to Spain as I have already spent a year working here in a primary school which I loved.
I really hope this experience contributes to my inter-personal skills of communicating with people and also organizational skills. In terms of professional growth, I hope to gain lots of business experience to inspire me to set up my own dancing school. This experience includes how to organize the finances and how to efficiently register all the students, how to effectively market and advertise the classes and activities on offer using web and social media, how to successfully distinguish myself from competitor dancing schools. The school at which I currently work does this very well by offering mostly adult classes in lots of different styles of dance and also renting out their spaces to different groups for a large variety of activities.
When I arrived abroad, the first week was quite stressful as it was difficult to find short-term accommodation. I also had to deal with starting my new job at the same time which was a challenge! My host entrepreneur was really friendly and helped show me how things work, I have already learnt a lot in terms of programmes used to register students such as Akaud and also Mailchimp.
