EUCANet Internship during COVID: Ottawa – Victoria, by Sarah Cool-Fergus

By Sarah Cool-Fergus

A bright hallway, a comfy-looking chair, an EU flag hanging on the wall, church bells ringing in the distance: these are the items and sounds which appeared in my colleagues’ backgrounds as we Zoomed every week over my past three months as an intern for EUCAnet. 

Working during COVID-times isn’t always easy when the room you sleep in is the room you work in (see picture below). However, the silver lining of remote work is that I had an opportunity to work with an organization several hundreds of kilometers away from my hometown near Ottawa that I otherwise would not have. I have also been fortunate enough to work with a dedicated team keen on continually bettering EUCAnet which has certainly made it much easier!

As in-person events switched to online, so too did my tasks. Over a year of stay-at-home work had made us realize just how crucial a strong online presence was. As a result, the bulk of my work involved helping create a new website – from conceptualization to content to design. This was a fun project to work on which required equal amounts of large-scale thinking as it did attention to minute details. I come away from this experience with a vast away of hard skills (e.g. how to use WordPress) and soft skills (e.g. communication, teamwork delegation, strategic thinking). These skills will no doubt be beneficial for whatever project comes next!

I would like to thank Beate, Svetlin, Fazila, Niklas, Julianna, Chris, Ann-Kathrin, and Oliver for being an amazing team to work alongside these three months!

 

 

About the author: Sarah Cool-Fergus (MA Erasmus Student, Intern – Spring 2021) joined the EUCAnet team in her second year of the Erasmus Mundus Master Program in European Politics and Society. She holds a BA in International Studies from Bishop’s University and focuses in city policies that are EU-Canada related.