As I begin my last week here in Berlin, I am beginning to reflect on my time here. I have had a great time in Berlin, but as I look back I have decided that it is certainly not a city I would choose to live in. Sometimes the fit just isn’t right! I have made some great memories, and met a lot of awesome people, and I will remember my experience in Berlin for the rest of my life. This past week I was able to have a good amount of fun. My bosses had a very busy week, so they took Friday off meaning we also were able to take a day off on Friday. We went to a new club on Thursday night and made some new friends, I met someone who grew up in Pittsburgh! On Friday I went to a noodle house on my own and had a really good soup and wontons. It was raining the whole weekend, so it ruined some of our plans during the day, but on Saturday we were able to get down to Alexanderplatz to have a nice chill meal at a cafe at the bottom of the TV tower, then we went up the TV tower to see the view of Berlin. If i am being honest the view was quite underwhelming and I spent 25 euros to get up there, so I was actually a little disappointed. At least I was able to go up there! On Saturday night I got a ticket to Tresor, the first techno club ever in Berlin, and had an awesome time. We ended up waiting in line for over an hour just to realize there was a specific line for people who had tickets, which was quite frustrating but I guess waiting in that massive line was an interesting experience with all of the people you make. I had a very lazy Sunday, and now I am at work. There has been some drama at work with our insurance company, as well as our bosses just simply being busy so we have not had as many assignments to do recently. I have been doing a lot of work trying to optimize our finance plan and our pricing strategies, as well as helping Cate create our company’s KPI dashboard, but that was generally her project. As I wrap up my last week I am going to try to leave my work in the best possible condition for someone to take it up in the future when Læmon hires more interns.

I don’t feel like there is much difference in the idea of success in Germany compared to the idea of success in the United States. I feel like in general the idea of success does have much variation in a business. You either succeed or you have more work to do. I think if I did the same exact task in a startup in the United States that I have done here the standard and the idea of success and completion will be exactly the same. It is not like my German boss would let mistakes slide that my American boss wouldn’t, thats just not how it works. Even if I look at this question from a different perspective in terms of like my bosses looking for funding from Venture Capital firms. They will set a goal for the amount of funding they want to receive, and if they hit that goal their mission was a success, and if they don’t they will look for more funding in the next round. I think this would be the exact same in the United States, as I think anywhere in the world completing your task or meeting your goals is considered a success. Then of course from there it is good to go above and beyond, and I have found that going above and beyond is encouraged just the same. I guess the one thing that may be different in Germany is the behavior of a “successful” employee, but it is more just based on the work culture in Germany. There is a better separation of work and play here, so it is rare for “successful” employees to work weekends or any crazy extra hours, they just work as hard as they can during the work day and enjoy their free time.