With funding from the EU in the form of Erasmus + scholarships from the Humboldt University of Berlin, two TAM students interned with TAM graduates this semester. One of these students was in DC working at the Goethe Institute on the Communications team for the Year of German-American Friendship. The other, Dominik Baer, has been working for Population Europe in Berlin. He writes:
“This winter I did an internship at Population Europe, a subgroup of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, a research institute here in Berlin. I am currently working on setting up a conference discussing the relationship between academia and politics. We are inviting other prominent German thinktanks and research institutes to get together with us and discuss how we, as academics, deal with politics, not only in general, but especially how we deal with accusations of fake news or bias. Right now, there is no unified academic response to this credibility issue, and each institute does their own internal analysis. Our goal is to discuss how and why we need to do this, as well as how we need to use our trusted position as experts carefully.
The planning of the conference took up a large part of my active internship time and will most likely continue during the summer semester here in Berlin.”
In addition, two more TAM students will seek the double degree and study in Bremen next year. As part of their degree requirements on the Bremen side, they will have research internships on the Bremen University campus. One will intern with Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines, the Vice Director of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. Pleines is also the Project Director of the project “External reform models and internal debates on the new conceptualisation of social policy in the post-Soviet region” at the new CRC “Global Dynamics of Social Policy.” The other TAM student will intern with members of the team in the project “Open welfare states? Social protection of labour migration and its repercussions for national policies” at the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy.” These internships were set up by the Bremen staff in close consultation with the TAM students. In this way, the internship will have direct relevance to the students’ existing research interests.
Valuable international work experience continues to be an important part of the TAM-program offerings!