Maggie (Without) Borders: My Year in Germany

I mentioned in a previous post that I would elaborate on what it’s like to be an intern in Germany. Allow me to deliver on that promise. As required by CBYX, I obtained an internship for the second half of my year in Germany (read more about that process here#). I was hired as a research and consulting intern at the Institute for Environmental IT Hamburg GmbH, or ifu. I’m currently in at the end of my third month of my five-month internship, so I feel like I can finally give you a good overview of what it’s like to be a US American intern in a German company. Of course, this pertains only to me—other PPPler have had wildly different experiences, but the only one I can share is mine. To give you an idea of how unique my experience was: my team is full of young people. The whole office is very relaxed, and there’s only about 25 people in ifu total. Going into the intership phase, we were fed stereotypes about German work/office culture (which probably really helped some peopl...

From the moment you hear that you’ve been accepted into PPP, you start thinking about the internship phase of the program. This is necessary for a couple reasons:          If you manage to secure an internship before a specific date (May 30, in my case), the city in which you got your internship will be your final placement           They tell you from the very start that you should look for internships ASAP The internship phase is the longest phase of the program, as well as the part that requires the most work from you. Everyone knows that obtaining an internship in the US is hard enough as it is--there's resumes to tailor, cover letters to write, cold emails to send, letters of rec to request, networks to build... and that's all done in English. If internship searches seem daunting in your native language, just wait until you've got to do it all in German.  For me, that really was the most difficult part of t...