This was the first full week where I worked for the NGO Tip:Tap. I must say that before this, I had never really worked in an office job before. The jobs which I had previously held were either remote or I was working in the customer service sector as a cashier or sales associate. Regardless of this being a completely new experience for me, I immediately fell in love with it. My supervisor is incredible, and she and I are sometimes the only two people in the office, so it has allowed her to give a lot of one-on-one advice.

My internship is unique in that I am not required to go into the office all five days of the work week. This is partly due to the fact that my supervisor herself doesn’t really go into the office all five days. So I can really choose which days I want to go into the office. Sometimes I go into the office for 2 days, or some weeks I go in for 3 days. Another factor which influences the reasoning behind it not being mandatory to go into the office every day during the work week is the fact that it takes an hour to commute to the office and an hour to commute back. This is because the office is located in Oberlandstraße, which is all the way on the other end of the city. Additionally, all employees who live in Berlin do not come into the office every single day.

Due to this unique setup, there are days where I am remote and work from home. Although this eases the stress of the commute, it also takes away the rigid schedule structure of being in an office. I believe that the benefit of working in an office is that you have a designated space where you go and do your work for a certain number of hours and then come home. However, with working from home, there are a lot of distractions, and your boss isn’t there, so you can get off track from completing your work. I find that in order to manage your time effectively and be productive, it helps if you remove yourself from your room and create a division between your workspace and your relaxation space.

To accomplish this, I often either head to a cafe near my accommodation or just go to a small park right across from where I live. Recently, I discovered this incredible Japanese cafe called Kama Japanische Bäckerei, which is very cozy and has delicious food and drink that I can consume while I eat. So going here and doing my work has made me very productive and helped me to focus on my tasks. I have decided to go into the office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so this gives me two days to work remotely. On the days when I commute to the office, I get there around 10–10:30 and leave whenever my boss leaves, which is around 4:30 p.m. So I have to make sure to set my alarm to wake me up at 8:30 a.m. so I have an hour to get ready and eat and an hour to commute there. And when I work remotely, I usually like to make sure I start at 10:30 a.m. as well so I can keep the routine of being in the office despite working from home.

I have a variety of tasks which I have to do. My main task is doing research and crafting a research paper on the current status of drinking fountains across Germany. The purpose of this paper is to educate people on why Germany needs to create laws or start initiatives to make water more accessible to the masses. I also have to look at how German law and international law work and how they can be used to push this agenda forward. My other tasks range from being required to attend meetings or events. If there is an event or meeting that day, I will first look at whether it is in the morning or the evening and then structure my workday around that. If an event or meeting is in the morning, I will first attend it and then the rest of the workday will focus on working on the research paper. However, if there is a meeting or event in the evening, then I will do as much work on the research paper as I can, then I will see how long it takes to get to the event or meeting, and then attend it. This allows me to make progress on my research while simultaneously ensuring that I attend the meetings and events.