Depending on the track selected, GLOCAL students have the opportunity to undertake an internship, placement, and/or consultancy during the programme. These opportunities fluctuate from year to year depending on availability, as well as the language capabilities and skill competencies of individual students.
Barcelona, Rotterdam and Los Andes offer an internship or consultancy project as a credit-bearing optional course. These are undertaken in agreement with the organisation and the university. Internships may be possible in other countries but these will not be credit bearing and should be discussed separately with the course convenor.
Mariia Balvan from our 2025-2027 cohort worked as a consultancy intern for Sinèrgics Coworking in Barcelona, and wrote about her experience below.
During the past months, I worked as a consultancy intern for Sinèrgics Coworking in Barcelona. It is the first municipal social return coworking space located in the Baró de Viver neighborhood of Barcelona.
Instead of paying full rent in euros, coworkers contribute four hours of work per month to the community and get unlimited access to the facilities.
Together with a team, we analyzed how this system works in practice.
We benchmarked it against market prices and studied how FLOCs (local currency) move between coworkers, entities, and local partners. Together, we looked closer at the main indicators and developed recommendations to strengthen the model.
It was interesting to see how local development actually happens, not through large investments, but through everyday knowledge exchange between people in the same neighborhood.
Grateful for the opportunity provided by Universitat de Barcelona.