My Internship Experience as an International Student in Germany

I am Niranjan Basnet, currently living and working in Germany. I want to share my experience and viewpoint related to the importance of internship as a foreign student.  Since 2014, I am here and I did my Masters’ Degree, here in Mannheim University and then started working after my studies.

As a foreign student, there were lots of pressure that came from study and work-life balance. But nevertheless, this was also preparing myself to manage and plan my schedule to perform the tasks in hand in the corporate world.

Wanting to do an internship was one thing but finding a good one was challenging. First of all, experimentation in yourself is really tiresome work and finding the right match for that experimentation is another story. Especially, in a country like Germany where German is preferred as one of the major job criteria, it was making things tough for me. I already had some experience in Nepal so that helped me a lot and my limited but enough knowledge about interaction in the German language was appreciated and lead me to start the internship.

 I started my voluntary internship in BASF (one of the World’s top chemical companies) that started from the end of 2017 till the beginning of 2018. In Germany, an internship is regarded as a plus point for starting a career in the related field. Of course, my limitations have really deviated only when it came to client interaction, which used to happen in the German language as it was more comfortable for them. Especially when they started the discussion, in conference calls were hard to catch and understand. I overcame this by coordinating well with my immediate supervisor and trying to get along with him for tasks at hand in English.

In my viewpoint, the studies are more focused to make yourself comfortable to experiment on yourself. I see the internship as experimentation on oneself. The work culture here also treats an intern with the task that is equally accountable and responsible. This really helps to understand the tasks and with accountability, it also gives you a sense of determination. Here internships are promoted as fully paid which is a reliable way to support yourself voluntarily. Unlike what I have seen in the rest of the world, here they consider intern as a temporary employee who has the desire to learn from your organization and for that they are well paid under the German Labour Regulations. In my opinion, this is also one of the vital points for doing an internship with good passion.

The internship is really nice experience and the portfolio becomes great if you have invested some considerable time into internship and gained experience while experimenting on yourself. The 6-month internship was really challenging for me because I was experimenting myself and my potential which really helped me to apply for permanent positions afterward, as by that time I was quite confident on what I do and I was building my expertise on one certain area. In my opinion, to take off with your career, internship plays vital role for professional and personality development.

He can be reached at Niranjan Basnet on Facebook.