Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) European Summit

​Well, we did it! We hosted a very successful summit and I had such a great time. While I was concerned we wouldn’t get everything done in time, we finally did and in my opinion it went off without a hitch (at least without any of the guests knowing about them lol).
Day One: I woke up at 7 am to a text from our US speaker that they were delated 5 and a half hours and wouldn’t be able to make it to speak. I got to EIE at 8:45 and we were still frantically trying to get everything done and ready. The programs needed to be printed, spots filled because people cancelled or had delays, or were simply going to be late because this is Spain. The event was scheduled to start at 11 and it started at 11:30 so all was well. For the beginning few hours, I sat at atable with the other interns and handed everyone their name tags, programs, notebooks, and collected their luggage, etc. Then we got to sit in on the panels once everyone had pretty much arrived. We had a lunch break where we had a lot of tapas. I sat at a table with one of the startups that works at EIE, a random woman that came to the summit to learn more, and my boss’s boss. Then there were more panels after lunch, and some start-ups that pitched their ideas briefly. Once people left that were more native to Madrid/Spain, everyone that was staying overnight in El Escorial for day 2, got on the bus and headed for Segovia. We were an hour behind schedule, aka on time, and it was exciting. Most of the people that stayed were from the UK. When we got there, we did a quit 20 minute tour around the city, but its brevity was no problem for me, because my school group was going to Segovia for the weekend, lol. Then we got to one of my favorite parts of the summit, dinner ;). We ate at a very famous restaurant, “Mesón de Candido.” We had such a delicious dinner. A lot of pig, because it’s a specialty, so we had pork sausages,  soup with different parts of the pig (like the ear), and then whole pigs were cooked and served to us in quite a unique way. I sat by a man named Nacho, and he was one of the co-founders of EIE and I felt very important. My immediate boss also sat by me and we bonded more than we had the entire time abroad haha. After dinner, we went to El Escorial, also way behind schedule, and arrived at the hotel. I had my own room, and I was super excited because I was ready for a comfy bed, and air conditioning. Needless to say, it’s still Spain, and the bed was comfortable. We were to have drinks at the open bar, but the bar was closed so they just made us a ton of drinks quickly and forced us outside. This was a little after 1 am. We stayed up chatting until 5 am!! I talked with some of the founders for hours about all sorts of topics, sports, politics, movies, and we ended up talking about the solar system and the starts and downloading the app where we can see all the constellations. It was quite fun. Then I went to sleep.

Day Two: Exhausted, I woke up at 9 am and headed to breakfast. The best part about this conference, is that while Madrid and the other places we have been visiting have been boiling hot, El Escorial and Segovia had such great weather. Not too hot and there was a slight breeze. We ate breakfast outside and then started the next panels. I was so into the summit, I even raised my hand in the last panel to comment, and it was just really fun. I felt like I was truly a part of the conference and I was proud that we pulled it off. The real best part, was how much I learned about entrepreneurship, even more than just learning how to spell the word “Entrepreneurship” without looking it up. After the last panel, we went to tour the Monastery in El Escorial. It was rather beautiful. Disclaimer: we were not supposed to take pictures, but I did anyways for you blog followers, so don’t hate me haha. Somehow I never got in trouble for it, even though most people did. After the tour, we had a tapas lunch and then headed home. In the end, I met a lot of people that were all very interesting, and very different, but all connected in a way because of entrepreneurship. If I still can’t decide what to do after this next year at Trinity ends, I will most likely email one of the speakers I met and get set up with their entrepreneur schools. We headed back to Madrid around 4 and then I came home and took a nap.

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