Hallo Alle!
My name is Andrew Germaine, but most people call me AJ! I will be a junior this upcoming fall and I am majoring in Global Management and Finance, along with obtaining a certificate in German. I am from Lancaster, Pennsylvania which is 4 hours away from Pittsburgh and roughly 2 hours away from Philly, so pretty central I’d say. Most of my interests accumulate around my favorite New York sports teams (Knicks, Yankees, Rangers, Giants) and also around music, as I have been singing in choirs for much of my life now.
Academically, I try to balance keeping up with my studies and making time for other organizations I am involved in on campus. I am involved in two different extra-curricular groups. First is Phi Beta Lambda (PBL), a professional business organization. Through PBL, I am able to attend professional, service, DEI, and social events. PBL has given me so many great opportunities to grow professionally, academically, and socially. The other organization I am involved in on campus is the Heinz Chapel Choir (HCC). The Heinz Chapel Choir is an internationally recognized mixed-voice acapella choir. This past academic year, I had the pleasure of serving as the business manager, where we were able to raise funds to support our 85th anniversary celebration!
In the professional world, this past semester I have recently joined 247 Fighting Championships, a local Pittsburgh Mixed Martial Arts promotion, as a social media intern. After I return from Berlin, I will be working more with 247 and hopefully expanding upon my role. This summer I am participating in the IIP Berlin program, where I will be interning at FormlyAI. FormlyAI is a company that is dedicated to helping startups attain CE marks for medical devices in a more streamlined, accessible manner through artificial intelligence.
I have chosen this specific program because it has been a goal of mine to go to Germany at some point during my academic career. I have studied the German language and culture for 7 years now, so it was very important for me to go. I would have had the opportunity in the past to do an exchange program in Altötting, Germany, but the program was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
While I do have many goals that I want to achieve during my internship, I would like to highlight my three biggest priorities. First, I want to improve my language skills through communicating with coworkers and local, native German speakers. I am far from fluent, but hopefully immersing myself in the culture will aid me in improving my communication skills. Next, I want to improve upon my reflection skills. One of my weaknesses is definitely not taking enough time to actually reflect upon experiences that I have in my life. Since blogs are required during this program, hopefully this will help improve those skills, as I want to retain as many lessons as possible from all of my experiences this summer. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to develop as many professional, transferrable skills as possible. This internship may not necessarily be in the field that I envision the rest of my career to be in, but I plan to learn as much as possible in order to transfer important professional skills into my other walks of life.
I am so unbelievably excited to begin this program this summer. It has been such a long time coming for me going to Germany and honestly, I still can’t believe that I am actually going! While I will be focused on my main internship with FormlyAI and still doing some work for my other internship with 247, I want to experience as much as I can from the German culture as possible. That may be a bit easier this summer, as the European Championship will be going on pretty much all summer. This excites me as a fan of soccer in general and hopefully, I will be able to attend a match or some of the festivities happening in the city. I have learned so much about Germany through all of my German education over the last 7 years (shoutout Frau Andrews) and it is still so surreal that I will be living there for 8 weeks.
I know that the lessons I learn along the way will be so, so valuable for the rest of my life and I am very excited to document it along the way. I hope anybody reading this will share in the excitement and the reflection of my summer along the way.
Bis Später!!