A single misplaced word in a residency filing can change what happens to someone’s entire life plan. That was one of the first lessons my internship taught me, and it’s the one I keep returning to.
This summer, I worked as a legal intern in the immigration department of Klev & Vera International Law Firm in Barcelona, Spain. I supported residency filings, permit renewals, and visa applications through online platforms like DEHÚ and Mercurio, as well as notarial and litigation translation. I already understood, in theory, what immigration work involved before I arrived.
But working at the law firm, day after day, was different from anything a classroom could teach me. I remember the first time I caught a discrepancy in a filing, one date, easy to miss, that would have delayed someone’s entire process by months.
For the first time, I felt the actual weight of what “attention to detail” means when a person’s life is on the other side of the document. I sat with case files where a single incorrectly read date or one missing stamp could unravel months of someone’s planning.
I helped prepare documentation for client representation, translated pieces of cases from Spanish into English and back, watched legal concepts shift slightly in meaning as they crossed languages, and supported several Golden Visa renewals through a process that was far more human, and far less linear, than I had ever imagined immigration law to be. Every file had a name attached to it.
Behind every name was a reason, a job offer, a family, a second chance that made the paperwork feel less like paperwork and more like a responsibility I had been trusted with. More than anything, the work reinforced something I already suspected about myself: that this is exactly what I want to spend my life doing. It was not a new discovery, but a confirmation of the difference between believing you are on the right path and finally feeling it, case by case, in your own hands.
Outside of the office, Barcelona itself gave me just as much to be grateful for. The city seemed to change with the hour. In the afternoons, sunlight spilled off balconies and pale stone façades until the streets felt luminous, almost alive.
I started noticing the curve of a building I passed every day, the way a narrow street would open without warning into a sunlit plaza, the patterned tile beneath my feet, the plants tumbling from balconies above shop windows I’d never have looked twice at back home. I paid attention to the rhythm of a conversation at a corner café, the sound of dishes being set out before dinner, the unhurried way people made time for each other in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Slowly, the city stopped being somewhere I was visiting and became a place I was learning to belong.
That same kind of learning happened through language. My supervisors moved naturally between Spanish and Catalan mid-conversation, and no one paused to announce the shift in the office; the fluidity was simply how things worked. At first, I recognized only a handful of Catalan words.
Then, hearing it every day, I started following whole conversations without meaning to. My favorite expression became, “que fort!” the kind of thing you say when something genuinely surprises you. I found myself saying it constantly, half without noticing. That is how you know a language has begun to stay with you: it starts slipping out on its own.
I think that ease came from somewhere older than this summer. Being born and raised in Nicaragua taught me early that culture lives in its small details, the ones no textbook description of a place ever captures. So, when I caught myself following a Catalan conversation without translating it or reaching for “que fort!” before I’d even decided to, it didn’t feel new. It felt like a new expression of something Nicaragua had already taught me: how to listen closely enough to understand a place through its people.
Having grown up in Nicaragua, studied at The University of Texas at Austin, and now interned at an international law firm in Barcelona, I’ve come to believe that no dream is too small or too far away to become real.
UT’s slogan reminds us that “What starts here changes the world.” This summer taught me that “here” is not always a single location. For me, it has been a classroom in Austin, an immigration office in Barcelona, and the home in Nicaragua that first taught me to dream beyond what I could immediately see. It starts with you, wherever you are.
One phrase stayed with me throughout the summer: “Be whatever your heart asks you to be.” I learned that becoming who your heart asks you to be does not always require certainty first. Sometimes, it requires paying attention, showing up, and trusting what the small details are telling you.
My internship taught me to read carefully, but Barcelona taught me that places, people, and even our own futures can also be read slowly, patiently, and with attention. The details that once seemed small became the ones that changed everything.
This blog was contributed by Nicole Morazan, Global Ambassador for Summer 2026. Nicole is a College of Liberal Arts junior participating in an internship with affiliate partner AIFS in Barcelona, Spain.
