Interning Abroad

I have not only been taking classes and traveling during my time abroad in Freiburg. I have also received an internship and will be doing working there for the next few months that I am here in Freiburg. The IES Abroad Language and Area Studies Program provides students with the chance to intern abroad along with the standard studying. It is a nice option to have, because I wanted to do both, but it would be extremely hard to go abroad two semesters and graduate on time, instead we just have to stay for an extra month, which is easy and doable. We even have the opportunity to receive credits from the internship. I have been interning for about two weeks now, and intern for about 10 hours each week, keeping me pretty busy but it will pay off and will be a good learning experience plus improve my German.

Roughly around 10 students from my program have an internship. The internships vary from working in a school, working with a political party, to working with various non profits, or my internship which is connected with the local university. Some of the students are doing translations, including myself, and some of the students are doing work such as gardening, or working as teaching aids. It is a diverse of internships, and so it is fun to talk to each other about our internship experiences.

I currently intern at the university’s Alumni office. I do mainly do work with translation of texts because they are slowly translating all of their brochures and texts into english. I have also helped translate emails, and help staff with writing emails to native english speakers. They typically have at least one American or native English speaker each semester. I am currently interning there with another student from my same IES Abroad program, and it is going quite well.

The office has a good culture, with a lot of helpful staff. A good portion of the staff are fellow students at the university, so it is fun to get to mingle with them from time to time. I even went out for lunch with a few of them at the Mensa (student dining hall) last week. The students also understand that I am learning German and speak German with me rather than switching automatically to english, which has happened from time to time before.

My internship has been great so far, and my semester has been going well too.