Hi everyone! My first official week of my internship in Berlin has come to a close. This has truly been the biggest learning curve I have ever had to manage as a student. It was busy and stressful at times, but also so rewarding and exciting to take on my job for the nest 8 weeks!

After a lovely day off on Monday (Germany nationally celebrates Pentecost on May 25th, which means most workers have the day off), I woke up bright and early at 6:45am to catch the S9 train to get to work! My commute is about an hour long, which may seem like a long time, but I’m learning keep myself occupied. I listen to music, look out the window while we pass through the city center, and read some of the book I’ve started. I highly recommend adding Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin to your reading list! Then, I hopped off the train, stopped by the grocery store on my walk to work to grab some coffee, and walked my way to the office.

I’m not going to lie, walking in the office on that first day was very intimidating. I built up the courage to finally walk through the doors, press the call button for my company, and get introduced to my home base for the next 8 weeks! Since my company is pretty small, I got a personalized tour from the CEO of the company, Dr. Lars Dähne! He showed me around the lab and all the different experiments that they are working on. My two favorites were their work on water purification and the use of micro/nanoparticles in experiments and healthcare. (maybe explain this more)

Finally, he showed me to my work station. My desk is surrounded by others who are working on their PhD’s, earning their master’s degrees, and people who have worked with the company for decades! I have yet to have a true conversation with all of them, but I’m excited to talk with them and hear their stories while I am here. After my first couple of days, one of my biggest learning curves in the office was time management. The parameters of my tasks for the next 2 months hadn’t really been figured out until the end of the week, so figuring out what to do the first part of the week was challenging. Here’s what I did:

At work, I learned that having a running checklist helps me to prioritize tasks and manage my time. This has helped me with school work throughout the semester, so I thought why not implement it into my day-to-day. Once I get a task, I thoroughly work on it with lots of thought and hard work. A lot of my tasks during week one were reading scientific literature and research other companies similar to ours to see how we can market and develop our products even better. On every paper I was assigned, I annotated and cross-referenced to make sure I fully understood what I was reading. Scientific articles can be very dense with a lot of information, so making sure I fully understood them was important. A lot of the articles I was reading also described products and processes that we were using at our company, so it was important to understand them. For research on other companies, I took detailed notes on every companies pricing, website layout, social media, etc and kept it on a running document to send to my supervisor. When I was finished with a task and didn’t have any work given to me, I went back to previous projects to see if I could make them even better. Could I have made my notes more detailed/cleaner? Did I miss anything while researching a companies website? Did I fully understand the paper I read yesterday? Questions like these helped myself stay occupied throughout the day.

One distraction I didn’t expect to keep me from managing my time was my phone. A lot of times the first couple days I found myself opening my phone and scrolling. I decided that it was important to keep my phone zipped in my backpack so I could remain focused on tasks. I also learned that music kept me very focused at work. Surprisingly, music helped me stay more focused then complete silence in the office. Headphones became an essential item to bring to work.

Thanks for reading about my first week! I’ll be reporting back next week about problem solving in the workplace and some ways I’m making use of my 5pm-9pm after my 9-5, so stay tuned!