Working Life

The fun times have to be over at some time and as I told you in my last post the time has come for me. Every day I get up between 7 and 7.30 (more 7.30 :P) and go to work for eight or nine hours. When I have lecture days I get up at the same time to go to Enschede. Look at some nerds and meet study friends, which is always great fun. After two months I can make my first conclusion: I really like it. That probably means that I have chosen the right internship. Until now I never thought in the morning „OMG I have to go work again and I don’t want to“. Of course I look forward to weekends, but that is most of all because then I finally have time for myself and do some fun things. Unfortunately I spend most of the evenings during the week studying at home, so weekends are precious fun time. I am looking forward to being truly grown up: having the evenings during the week free as well and, even more important make more than 2,60 € an hour. The fact that I get free laundry detergents and cosmetic products does not really make up for that. But I learn a lot, get to write my thesis and it is only for 6 months, so it’s okay for now. I am looking forward to work for real.

Right now I am enjoying another aspect that comes with working life. Since free time is scarce, travelling is getting much more scarce than I am used to (which is obviously not the good part), but the scarcity of free time gives me the perfect excuse to travel in my favourite way: by plane. I am on my way to Berlin right now and since cheap train tickets were already sold out and going by bus is just NOT an option, I am hanging out at Schiphol right now, drinking White Chocolate Mocca and waiting to board my plane. Getting here was a bit of a hassle, because the Dutch Railways are showing their sweetest side this week (again). On Monday some wagons of a train got out of the rails between Utrecht and Rotterdam/The Hague. It continued riding for like 5 km and destroyed the rails and the platform of the station it passed. So no trains riding there. People going from Utrecht to Rotterdam have to travel via Schiphol (check the map, it’s kind of ridiculous). Fortunately I wasn’t affected by that, but the train I was taking to Schiphol got cancelled and I just had 10 mins to drop off my luggage when I got here. Luckily I checked in online yesterday night, because real check-in was already closed. So unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time to hang out. Which is sad, because Schiphol is my happy place. I just love being here. And I haven’t been in over a year.

In a few minutes I am going to fly to Frankfurt, where I have just been twice, travelling to Argentina and coming back. But I think I will like it almost as much as I like Schiphol. Maybe flying to Berlin via Frankfurt is not very „acting sustainably“, but I think AIESEC makes an exception on this value when it comes to travelling. My Mum also criticised the means of travelling and the itinerary, BUT it was cheapest (well except for the bus) and best fitted my schedule. And it is not my fault that Berlin is economically irrelevant and therefore does not have too many direct flights to and from other European capitals. On top of that: I use public transport every day and bike the rest of the time. So I can fly as much as I want to.

GET A LIFE!!!!!!

As much fun as all the Twilight-reading, travelling to Russia and hanging out in Münster around christmas was, it could not last forever. I had no idea what to do next, no financial resources and still no computer. So it was time to start fixing all that.

While being in Canada I had already decided that I would probably not just keep AIESECing, but first finish my studies. So when I applied to some internships while I was still in Canada and also sent two more applications during the holidays. But nobody was working during christmas and New Year`s, so I didn`t get any answers until after I was back from Russia. I returned the sunday after New Year`s and on monday my dad and I went to Saturn to buy me a shiny MacBook. I know this is spoilt and materialistic, but I was soooooo happy and relieved. I had my life back. I had a place to store all my data, a computer that was truly mine that I could take anywhere and on top of all that, it was a Mac. No more firewalls, antivirus programs and fatal system errors!!! Why are people using Microsoft? 

That monday I packed up my Mac and went to Enschede to meet with my OC. Of course I couldn`t just let AIESEC be AIESEC. It`s AIESEC Twente`s 20th anniversary this year and since my dear friend Wiebke is OCP of the Committee that is organizing a gala for that I just had to join as well. So, for a change, I am Organizing Committee Vice President Communications for our Alumni Event at the moment. Life is just nicer if you have an AIESEC title. Well, I met my OC that night, went to AIESEC Alumni drinks (which was much less spectacular than I had expected for some reason) and the next morning I paid a visit to my former workplace, borderconcepts in Gronau. Since I did not have a source of income that seemed a wise idea and Michael, my boss, loved it too. He immediately put me into an office and gave me a huge bunch of work. A week later he also gave me a dutch contract so I could apply for Studiefinancering. That solved my financial paradox and also gave me an occupation. There was so much work to do that I could go to Gronau anytime I want. Less hanging out at home. Positive. And more good things happened. 

Somewhere in that week I received an e-mail from Henkel. I had applied for a marketing internship there from March on. They asked me if I was interested in an internship in another department that would start in February. So a week later I had an interview for an internship in the Brand Management of Schwarzkopf Henkel Hairstyling in Nieuwegein, close to Utrecht. The interview went okay, but I wasn`t too confident. I had to wait three dreadful days for an answer and was already making a lot of Plan Bs (since I had just discovered I was also missing two more Master`s courses), when on the Friday they called me and told me they wanted me to come and work for them. OMG I was soooooo happy. Internship at a multinational company in Fast Moving Consumer Goods. Exactly what my plan was. I think at that point people around me started to get scared...I wasn`t even back for a month but I had things arranged quite well. But another issue arose: I was starting my internship over two weeks...in Utrecht. Which is not on commuting-distance to Münster. So I needed a room. And of course it had to be big, quite central and in a nice house. I searched really intensively and after visiting Utrecht another time and looking at some places I had also accomplished that. 17 m2, just outside the city center, next to a park, a supermarket and a bus stop. 475 euros...which people who don`t live either in the west of the Netherlands or other European capitals don`t really understand, but that`s the way it is. I took me a time to get used to the thought that my intern salary doesn`t pay my rent. But I had to live in a nice place. Having lived here for 1,5 months I am happy and regretless. 

I moved to Utrecht on February 2nd with the help of my dear family and the dearest Coniurata. Of course, as usual, I was tempted to kill my family during the moving, but I kept myself in, knowing they would leave soon. And they did. I unpacked and arranged and the next day my Utrecht life started. I get up every morning between 7 and 7.30 (haha those good Canadian times when I just slept as much as I want), then take the bus and the tram to work, work from 8.45 to 17.30 and then take the tram and the bus back home. In the first two months of my internship (which are almost over) I have one day in the week off to go to Enschede and visit lectures and study. That is kind of nice because it splits the work week. I like my internship a lot: it is diverse work, a lot of numbers and analyses, which I have never really dealt with before. So I already learned soooooo many things about that side of marketing. Which is, especially in FMCG, way more important than creative advertising-design. I also got a pretty good impression of how a global company works and I really like that and there are also a lot of cool things to do: writing texts for product introductions, coming up with concepts for advertisements and websites and organizing things internally. It`s fun, my colleagues are nice and I have a lot of fellow interns in other departments so we can share our experiences and hang out sometimes. 

Work is also exhausting. On friday nights, I am worthless. A tired something. It is pretty hard at the moment, because I am also taking two courses this block and they both include an exam and papers so I spend my days working and my nights and weekends studying for the greatest part. Not too much fun! But it will be over in a month and I just wouldn`t have been a happy person living at my parent`s and just taking courses. 

Utrecht is a great place to live. Beautiful, not as freaky as Amsterdam, not as metropolitan (in a bad way) as Rotterdam and central, so I can go anywhere if I want freaky or metropolitan for a day or a night. I also very much like that I didn`t have to make friends here, because they were already there and they keep coming. Jenny lives 25 minutes by train away, Niels lives in walking distance again and Annika is doing an internship in Rotterdam. And in May Nelleke will move into my house. And live next door to me. She visited yesterday and my roommate is leaving, so we are both very very excited. We`ll be roommates finally!!! After all our great plans have failed in Enschede. More and more people who are graduating come here from Enschede, so I won`t be alone and bored. 

Everything just turned out really well. Which makes me think...even though I hurt myself a lot by tripping or walking into things, being me is still quite good!