Week 3 at the icd

Last week was a great week. On Monday I was permanently assigned to work on the news team, which is what I wanted. The news team tends to get the more interesting and relevant work, so I’m glad to get to continue to be working with them.

I also had my first case study approved, which means I will be starting my own research project this week. My topic is the role of cultural exchange in the development of democratic institutions in the United Nations. I had my first interview for the study on Thursday with Andreas Bummel, founding director of the Committee for a Democratic United Nations and head of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. The interview was over the phone since he was out of Berlin, but it lasted around a half hour and went really well. I was surprised by how much I actually liked conducting interviews. It is like a game that you play trying to get the interviewee to say what you want them to. However, since the interview was over the phone I’ve been having a really hard time transcribing it from the Dictaphone, as it’s hard to make out exactly what is being said through the static. I’m hoping to get the interview transcribed and a tentative outline of my project written up by the end of next week. I also managed to write two other proposals for case studies this week, although I think I might wait until I’m finished with the current one before I try to get them approved.

There was also a conference this week at the icd on cooperation between Latin America and Europe. I thought that this topic sounded interesting so I went to see one of the speakers only to find out that they were speaking Spanish, which was a bummer. I did, however, get to cover events taking place at the European Commission office in Berlin and the Bundestag (German Parliament). At the EU Commission I was covering a speech by Dr. Ulrich Brückner, a Stanford professor working for Team Europe, a group that works to educate the world on the role of the European Union. Following this speech we went to the Reichstag, where we heard another speech and got a chance to tour the Reichstag building. This was something that was on my list of “tourist” things to do, so it was nice to be able to do it during work, which also allowed me to skip the lines.

The rest of the week was spent writing the academic report on the Berlin International Economic Conference. This is interesting work, but requires a lot of time spent watching video footage from speeches and even more time spent rummaging through old notes trying to find particular information. Hopefully we will be able to get it published in the near future, if our boss is ever able to decide exactly which format he wants it to be in. That’s all for this week. Tschüss aus Berlin.