EUCANet’s growing engagement with interns from Europe , by Beate Schmidtke

The EUCAnet team is growing thanks to the various interns that we could welcome as part of our projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. While our interns have not been able to join us physically at our home institution, the Centre for Global Studies  at the University of Victoria, many are thrilled about the opportunities to build relationships online, to learn many skills independently, and to engage with our team even while living at their homes in Europe.

This summer our team has been able to draw on an exceptionally dynamic group of students: Niklas has been very gifted and instrumental in developing a systematic approach to transfer our old website into a new language; Sarah brought her many social media skills to work that she learnt during her ERASMUS internship at an NGO in Europe; Christian supports the team with its efforts to update the new website and allows our team to explore new terrain when it comes to developing new projects in the field of the environment and democracy; and Laurence who already collaborated with EUCAnet for an essay contest and is a fantastic writer not only supports our website but also collaborates on the development of a video script and school materials for  the Jean Monnet Project European Memory Politics. Last but not least, we are soon welcoming Julia (also from Germany) and hope to learn from her when it comes to developing our online outputs.

That way, our EUCAnet interns play a vital role in various projects and our regular meetings allow us to connect with team members Fazila and Ann-Kathrin.  For instance, on April 1st, 2021, we met with the Centre for Global Studies director (Oliver Schmidtke) and the operations director (Jodie Walsh)  and shared some of our projects’ miles stones and current initiatives. It was also a good opportunity to meet our current interns Niklas Lehmann, Sarah Cool-Fergus and our UVic students Fazila and Julianna. In addition, we welcomed our new intern Christian Tautphäus  from the Kehl University in Germany. During the session, we also explored the various components for the new EUCAnet website.

Have a great holiday everybody! PS Sorry for the secret screenshot to test our team news section… next time I make sure all know about it :)