Two summers on the other side of the Atlantic

Montauk, New York and Williamsburg, Virginia · 2016–2017

There is no code on this page. It is here because it explains the others.

At 19 I flew to New York on my own, with a work visa, one suitcase and English I had learned mostly at school and from the internet. I spent the summer working at the Montauk Yacht Club, at the far end of Long Island. The next summer I went back, this time to a DoubleTree by Hilton in Williamsburg, Virginia.

In numbers

• Time: two summers of about 14 weeks, working around 60 hours a week.
• Money: about $6,000 saved, which paid for a year of living costs at university.
• Errors: about 5 guest problems a day, solved before they reached a manager.
• Adoption: moved onto the events team after 3 weeks.
• Scale: events for up to 300 guests, and an IELTS score of 8.0 three years later.

The work

Long shifts, guests who expected everything to be perfect, and managers who didn’t care where you came from, only whether the job got done. I carried luggage, served tables, set up events for 300 guests and learned to fix a problem before anyone noticed it.

What it gave me

• Courage. Nobody is coming to help, so you work it out. The first week was the hardest I had had.
• English, for real. Not the school kind: phone calls, complaints and jokes, eight hours a day. Three years later I scored 8.0 in IELTS.
• Service. A system only works when the person using it is happy. I learned that behind a hotel desk long before I wrote it in a proposal.
• The habit of going. Arad, Timișoara, Bucharest, Aarhus, Copenhagen: every move since started with these two summers.

I’m an explorer. Most of what I’ve built since started the same way: going somewhere I didn’t know, and staying until I did.