Karsten Kneese in Umea, Sweden and on Achill Island, Ireland

As for most of the students of the RheinAhrCampus who want to do an internship abroad, my story starts at the office of Dr. Laurent Borgmann. During one of Dr. Borgmann's more recent projects I met people from Umea, the biggest city in the north of Sweden, so I came to his office with the vague idea of going there, since I always wanted to explore the north a bit more. The vague idea became a very concrete plan and after about one hour we agreed that I would do a five-months internship for media-net-works, one of his projects.

This internship would start with a kick-off-meeting in Brighton, would than take me to Sweden and after three months, to Achill Island, Ireland. The perspective of doing my internship in four different countries was very appealing to me, so I took on the challenge to do a lot of different things in a relatively short amount of time. Only three weeks after our meeting, I went to Brighton to attend a meeting of the project co-ordinators. Involved in this project are students from several universities and institutions from all over Europe, and it was fascinating to see so many different people with very different backgrounds work together in such a good and creative way as they did. During this meeting I also got to know Mrs. Pat Shrimpton, with whom I was to work together for the next three month at the University of Umea. Live couldn't have treated me better, since she is an amazingly nice and warm person, and we got along very well. So, after all that I finally went to Umea in Sweden.

I have never been abroad for more than a few weeks, so I was really curious about everything. The international office of the university provided me with a room and I was ready to face the upcoming challenges. My main task was to help Pat with the preparation and organisation of a big ISIS project meeting in Ireland, so there were many different things to do. (ISIS (Intercultural Strategies for International Success) is a sub-project of media-net-works. You can find out more about it by clicking here.) I worked on an online platform, which functioned as the communication and working centre for the participating students, I was looking for new technologies which might be useful for the project, like weblogs or podcasting. I worked with the Swedish participants and functioned as a 'communication hub' for the different stations, just to mention a few of my tasks.

I also had the chance to get to know the humlab and its amazing team. The humlab is a kind of 'high tech think tank' and is organizing a lot of interesting and inspiring seminars and courses. During one of those seminars I met Howard Rheingold, which was one of my personal highlights. He is such an amazing character and one of the leading thinkers in the field of mobile technology and its influences on social structures and behaviour, which I find very interesting. I also met professional bloggers at 'BlogWalk 5', a kind of low scale hands on approach to bring interesting people together, and it worked very well.

Since I was working in the English department most of the time I didn't have any language problems. Besides that, most of the Swedes speak very good English, and for a German it is also relatively easy to learn Swedish. So, what about the social live and the Swedes? Well, there are about 25.000 students in Umea, so the social live was pretty good. There are three pubs/clubs directly on the campus and corridor parties at the dormitories every weekend. The city itself has enough to offer to keep you busy and to provide you with several opportunities to have a good time. The three month in Umea passed by way too quick, but I was looking forward to Achill Island, my next station for my internship.

After a short break in Germany for Christmas I headed to Ireland, where I first travelled through the whole country to get to Achill, an island on the west coast. My main task there was prepare the ground for the ISIS 2005 project meeting, so I had four weeks time to meet people, raise the interest for our project, organize accommodation for about 40 people and stuff like that. At the same time I was working at Achill Tourism, the local tourism office. My colleagues there were a great help and supported me and our project in every thinkable way. They really do try to promote their Island and it was very interesting for me to work with them. Again, time passed by at high speed and suddenly the 'big day' was there. Almost 40 people from all over Europe arrived on Achill Island to spend one week filled with seminars, courses and activities. Everything worked out very well, which was a great relieve for me. Apparently I had done a good job and everybody had a really good time.

After leaving Achill Island the whole group stayed a few more days in Dublin. I really enjoyed the city, after having spent more than 5 weeks on a beautiful but very rural island. Back in Germany I spent about a week with the wrap-up of my internship before my last real semester break commenced. After all I had an amazing time and got to know so many people and places that I won't have any problems to organise a holiday during the next years. There will always be a place to go. I took a lot out of my internship and I can just recommend going abroad. It is an experience you'll never forget. If I have learned one thing during my internship that it is that' home is not where you live, but where they understand you.'

Karsten Kneese