It is my second week in Berlin already, and I have officially started my internship at Isolier Wendt in the supply chain department. Time really flies so fast here when we are not working. The first week of work has been fun. The onboarding process I had was short and sweet. Everyone in the company is welcoming, and since it is a smaller company, everyone knows each other and works closely together. I work from 8 am to 5 pm Monday to Thursday and get off early at 2:30 pm on Fridays. I’m gonna be honest that it has been rough to wake up early to go to work. My sleeping schedule has been a mess, and the jet lag has not been fixed yet. It takes about an hour by train to get to the company, so I have to wake up around 6:30 am and leave around 7 am every day. Though, one thing I love about summer in Berlin is that the sun does not set until at least 9 pm, so it still feels like daytime when I get off work instead of nighttime. 

Even though the first week of work has not been too busy, I certainly felt the need to have good time management as work is slowly getting busier. Prioritizing tasks by importance is especially crucial when undertaking several tasks all at once. My supervisor has assigned me different projects with different due dates. I am being responsible for a long-term data redundancy reduction project on my own, an immediate shipping project with a team, and a relatively short-term training optimization project. Of course, it is now my priority to complete the immediate shipping project with the team first before I put too much time into working on the long-term project. However, it is important to allocate my time efficiently as it is not ideal to put off and be stressed out working overtime later on projects that have longer due dates. I am spending 70% of my time working with the team on the shipping project, 20% of my time on the data redundancy reduction project, and the last 10% of my time on the training optimization project as it has just been given to me. My strategy here is to work on every project at the same time and allocate my time accordingly. I feel like working on everything at the same time keeps me entertained rather than being bored over the same project every day, and I make progress on everything as well. I have actually been managing my time the way I am doing now at school, and so far it has been working for me at school, so I will keep doing it during my internship here and see what works best for me.

I am still getting used to living in Berlin and going to my internship, but it has been exciting to see what the city has to offer. I went and tried a Taiwanese restaurant on Friday, and it definitely made my homesickness better by having good home cuisine. On the weekend, I went to a park, sitting on the grass under the sun with friends. I also went to a flea market on Sunday, and it was fun and interesting to see how big of a flea market culture here in Berlin is. There are so many flea markets around the area, and they are really crowded as so many people go there thrifting. Even though most of the fun places take about 45 minutes to get to by subway from the hotel we are staying in, I really enjoy taking the subway because it feels like exploring as a local by taking public transit. I still have not explored many places in Berlin yet, and I did not really plan anything prior to coming here. But I can’t wait to go out more and discover the beauty of the city in the next couple of weeks.