"Berlin, Berlin ... I wanted to go to Berlin"

An internship in the home office

Just over a year ago, few people would have thought that such a sentence would not only be heard from failed footballers in these times, but also from practitioners at a political science research institute. But like so many other things, the current COVID-19 situation has also thwarted my plans for an internship. What initially sounds like the potential for funny situations or even moments of boredom turned out to be an exciting and instructive time for me.

At the beginning of my internship, it was initially planned that the majority of my work would take place from my home office in Hanover and that individual appointments requiring attendance would be held together with my colleagues at IParl. In the course of the internship, however, my first visit turned out to be the only in-person meeting due to the consistently high infection rate. A decision that was the only right one in terms of infection control.

During my time as an intern, there were hardly any opportunities for direct dialogue on site. However, the general openness in the team made it unexpectedly easy to get involved digitally. In particular, the open welcome on my first day of my internship and the good interactions between colleagues proved to be an important prerequisite for the best possible start to my internship.

As a student on the Bachelor's degree programme in Political Science, the main aims of my internship were to experience an interesting future career field and to carry out activities that were directly related to my studies. Looking back, I can say that: I was able to fully realise both goals at IParl. The structure of the internship as a "buddy programme", which gave me a good insight into the main areas of work of the individual employees and the institute as a whole, contributed to this in particular. During the two months, I was able to familiarise myself with the wide range of research topics at IParl - from the nomination of candidates for the German Bundestag to second chambers and the internal organisation of parliamentary groups - and was able to contribute my own ideas as well as learn from the expertise of my colleagues.

What I also particularly liked was that I was always given enough freedom to realise my own projects during my internship. Creating this opportunity made it particularly clear to me that my role as an intern was not just to work and watch, but that the realisation of my own ideas was expressly desired and supported by the entire team. The quantitative focus of my studies gave me the opportunity to work independently on a project using the survey data from the candidate positioning project for the Bundestag elections, in which I was able to deal with the role of gatekeepers in the parties in the descriptive representation of candidates with a migration background in depth, both theoretically and methodologically.

To summarise, I can look back on an interesting internship due to the many exciting topics and the open and friendly atmosphere at IParl!

A report by Dario Landwehr, student of political science at Leibniz Universität Hannover.