A Much More Benign Invasion of Dresden

You make be asking yourself, 'how is it that Nathan came to Germany in the first place?' Well, despite my refusal to write about it (more on that later), I'm working as an intern at BASF, also known as the largest chemical company in the world. My internship is provided for and partially funded by the DAAD, which is the German governmental bureau overseeing all of the country's academic exchange programs. As a (mandatory) token of my appreciation for the scholarship they gave me, I attended a DAAD conference in Dresden last weekend to give them an opportunity to convince me to work and study in Germany.

I arrived in Dresden at 8 a.m. on Thursday after a four-hour (yes, we left at 4 in the morning) Mitfahrgelegenheit from Mannheim. The city itself is very beautiful, but I think I'll leave that discussion for another post. Because I'm sure you're way more interested in hearing about this conference, anyways. And what a conference it was! DAAD is providing funding for about 500 students and recent graduates this summer (including 100 who are working in industry like myself), and it splits those people between two conferences in Germany. In the past, there was only one (in Heidelberg), but they decided to tack on another this year because we've got record participation numbers. So about 250 of us wound up in Dresden for the three-day-two-night affair.

These official conferences tend to have a relatively conspicuous agenda, and this one was no different. I would say there were two main reasons DAAD brought us to Dresden:

1. To pump us up and get us really excited about being in Germany.
2. To shove a bunch of pamphlets about graduate school/internships in Germany down our throats

That second one is not all that surprising. Like I said, DAAD oversees all of the academic exchanges in Germany, and that includes way more than a program for college kids to work in an academic lab for a summer or graduates to work in an industry lab for six months. Add to that the fact that the Technical University of Dresden got co-sponsoring credit for the weekend, and we were in for a good deal of career fairing and presentations. It wasn't too bad, though: I did get a pack of mints and two BASF tote bags out of the weekend.

But the DAAD's attempts to make us excited about Germany were a little strange. It's not that they weren't effective -- three former DAAD participants all gave talks about their time here, and it made me want to do nothing but hang out with Germans -- but that it came so late in the game. I'm in Germany for six months, which makes me one of the outliers of this program. All of the undergraduates are only here for the summer, and a lot of industry interns are going back to grad school in August, which means that a meeting during the last weekend of July meant a meeting at the tail end of most people's programs. One of my friends from here finished work the day before the conference. So while I appreciated the presentations about how awesome it is to be living in Germany and how much we need to take advantage of it, for the most part it was just an awkward reminder of the fact that people were leaving in less than a month. If I had been leaving earlier, I might have even been pissed.

In any case, for my purposes the weekend was a success. In addition to the meetings and presentations, we got a walking tour of the city, a chance to meet people working all over Germany, a lot of free time and an awesome four-course dinner complete with spit-roasted whole suckling pigs and maßes that were shaped like giant Stella Artois glasses (rather than the usual liter mug). I also got to present my research, which was pretty cool, especially considering I got a free DAAD flash drive out of it.

So all in all a good time. I'll put up some pictures and details of my trip next time.