Weeks Four and Five at the icd

I grouped these two weeks together because we were largely working on the same thing throughout this time. This work was centered around the academic report on the Berlin International Economic Conference. The reason this took so long is that after we had initially completed the report, our supervisor decided that he wanted it redone in a completely different way, which required completely different analysis and research. This was enormously frustrating, but also seemed like a good glimpse into what actual working life could be like in the future. We have learned, however, that the format of report that we turned in at the end of the week was accepted and will be published on the website in the future, so that is encouraging and pretty cool.

Outside of the work on the report I also had the chance to go to the Berliner Festspiele and German Foreign Office (basically the German State Department). The Berliner Festspiele is one of the icd’s partners and a promoter of cultural exchange within Berlin. They gave us an overview of their activities and a rundown of what they have planned for the future. It wasn’t terribly interesting, but it was good to get a glimpse at another culturally-based organization in the area, as the role of culture in society is an ambiguous one and one that, when addressed differently, can take on an entirely new meaning. The German Foreign Office was more interesting as they outlined how the ministry uses their funding and what effects they intended their funding to have on foreign policy. We also were informed on the areas in which the office puts their main focuses. One of the reasons this was particularly interesting was that the man giving us the presentation was actually at one time an intern at the icd.

Another interesting task that I had this week was reporting on a speaker at the Cultural Bridges in Germany conference held by the icd. This is something that we do quite often; however, this particular speech was in German, so my language skills were really tested for the first time. I was able to understand a large portion of the speech, but found myself scribbling down words to look up later as well. This article also allowed me to do some research on the unification of Germany and the social effects that linger in the country. As part of this I also interviewed around 10 participants at the conference to incorporate their perspectives into the article. We were going to use these interviews as testimonial interviews for the conference, however when we got into the office this week we found out that the microphone we were using ran out of batteries and that the interviews weren’t recorded. Luckily I did the interviews with my boss, so I can’t really get in trouble. That’s all for now.