The Culture Shock I Didn’t Expect Came From a Lunch Break

At my office, lunch is an actual break. It could last an hour. It could last two. It isn’t a quick sandwich at your desk or eating with one hand while answering emails with the other. People step away from their computers, sit together, talk and maybe take a smoke break somewhere in between.

During my first few lunches, I couldn’t fully relax. Part of me kept thinking, Shouldn’t I be working right now? Nothing urgent was waiting for me, and nobody was asking me to return to my desk. Still, sitting there for that long made me feel unproductive. Meanwhile, my coworkers weren’t watching the clock or rushing back to their desks. For them, pausing wasn’t separate from the workday. It was part of it.

For the past month, I’ve been interning with a Paris-based nongovernmental organization focused on international volunteering, public service, solidarity and adventure. I work closely with its four-person communications team, supporting multimedia projects, editing English-language content and creating promotional and outreach materials. I can’t speak for every workplace in France or the United States. One internship can’t represent an entire country. What I can compare is my experience working in Paris with the professional environments I’ve known in Oregon and one of the first differences I noticed was the pace.

During my first week, my boss gave me an assignment that I finished in about two hours. To me, two hours already felt like a long time. To my team, it was surprisingly fast. Instead of telling them I was done, I panicked. I worried they would assume I had rushed through it or, to put it bluntly, half-assed it. So I spent another hour triple-checking everything. I reopened every link, searched for grammatical errors and made tiny changes that probably didn’t need to be made. Eventually, I ran out of ways to look busy and had to confess: I was done.

I expected my supervisor to review the assignment and find something I had missed. Instead, the work was correct. I had even caught errors on the organization’s English-language website and suggested alternatives for French phrases that didn’t translate naturally into English. That should have made me feel confident. Instead, I was left wondering what I was supposed to do next.

That became a pattern during my first week. I would receive an assignment, finish it and wait for feedback or another task. Sometimes, I became frustrated waiting for a Teams reply, approval from a supervisor or the next step on a project. I started wondering whether my entire internship would feel this way. Then I looked around and realized nobody else seemed worried. The work was still getting done. Projects were moving forward. People just weren’t treating every assignment like a race.