The everyday life of interns at the DAI

Hello dear ones,

first of all welcome to our DAI-Blog. Today you will learn a little about us interns and what we have experienced at the DAI in the past weeks.

First a short introductory round. At the moment we are a bit like the Three Musketeers of the DAI: Lilly, Nicolai and Lara.

Lilly is 18 years old, has just graduated from high school and has been doing an internship at the DAI for almost three months now. Nicolai, the only man in the group, is 20 years young and has golden wavy hair. Fun. Nicolai started after his FSJ as an intern at the DAI and will stay until the end of the year. And Lara is 21 and has been with the DAI for three months now, having given up her future career as a teacher early on.

At the moment we are sitting comfortably in the DAI conference room at Sofienstraße 12 in Heidelberg and writing this entry together. We thought we’d start by telling you our general schedule for a week.

Monday morning in all freshness, between 9:00 and 10:00 o’clock, we slow down Pracktis (so actually only Lara, because she constantly has problems with the Deutsche Bahn) slowly. At 10:00 a.m., everyone meets for the weekly meeting to distribute event services for the coming weeks and review past events.

We’ll get started after the meeting. We practice basically have three big babies. So three tasks that we pursue almost daily: The posters, the flyers and the girls’ flea market. Whether rain or sunshine, the rearrangement of the posters must be almost daily. We then update the posters around the house and make sure that the flyer stand is full and up-to-date. The flyers of the house have their own special place: the Kabuff. The place where the interns have to know their way around like in their trouser pockets. That means: sort old and new flyers and keep them tidy.

And then there’s the girls’ flea market, our biggest baby. Here, the practical side of event planning can let off steam. We plan everything with the support and guidance of the program assistants and PR specialists: from setting the date to the participants to the course of the day. We answer in advance the millions of mails to the stand inquiries to the girls flea market and organize food and drinks for the day. Here we could all experience three times how much effort is behind such a planning and how important it is to keep the overview. Because everything from napkins to PR material has to be organized.

As far as the other events are concerned, Nicolai and Lara can probably say that they have lost the overview completely in the meantime. Lilly is the only one who is still able to see through the whole thing, as a walking diary of interns. At the evening events we usually take over the bar or the entrance and get a little bit more information about the lectures themselves. Highlights besides the girls flea market were Harald Lesch, Richard Dawkins and Deniz Yücel – just to name a few. Nicolai’s personal highlight was Insects Day, where he could stand on stage with KiKa child star Checker Can. Here we simply had the cool opportunity to get a little behind the scenes and to be present at the lectures, which we might not have experienced in this form under normal circumstances.

But to get back to the subject of losing track. One of our main tasks at the moment is the target group research for individual events. One thing we had to learn first. It is not so easy to think about who might be interested and who might not. Thank Google for this place.

But an internship at the DAI doesn’t just mean sitting behind a computer all the time: there’s also plenty of fresh air! Whether distributing posters or free tickets, after three months we can say that we know Heidelberg very well. We took every effort and effort on ourselves, even if that meant getting stuck in the elevator.

We hope you got a good insight into our everyday life as interns. That’s it from us! Paris, Athens – goodbye!