I love London. I love my work. I love the people I work for.
And this isn't the kind of feeling you get when you begin adventures in an exciting new place. This feels comfortable and familiar. It feels like home. And we Euroculturers know how difficult is to feel like home when every few months we are being rendered homeless and have to up and away with our life's belongings to a new country. I'm told it's perhaps just the new-ness of everything around me and the excitement of a new job that is making me feel so optimistic. Maybe it is, and maybe you will need to check back with me in a while to see if I still feel the same :) But for now, this is how it is.
So since this is an internship blog, let me tell you what my internship is actually about. I'm interning with the online communications team at AI. The team works with people from regions where there are no field offices (South Asia, Africa and Latin America specifically). We use online communication tools like emails, blogs, social networks, sms, etc. to mobilise people in these regions to be aware of, support and participate in AI's efforts to promote human rights in their respective regions and around the world. My job as an intern is to write emails for specific campaigns, connect with people who want to support AI and tell them how to go about it and basically use blogs, social networks (yes, I have to be on facebook as part of my job :)) etc. to get more and more people to be a part of this. I also do some stuff with the project manager like creating graphs, data tables, diagrams, documentation and research of all the work that they have done. Since it is a fairly new team, they don't have a solid database of their work and so I'm helping them building that up.
That's the basic work I do. What makes is special though is the people I work with. I think it is a side-effect of being a Euroculture student, that I am now totally addicted to working/living with an international mix of people. And luckily for me, this organisation has exactly the EuCu-kind of people mix that I wanted... different countries, different cultures, different colours, different accents... all coming together. In my core team of 5 people itself there are already 3 different nationalities (and suprisingly, british isn't the majority :))! All over the office there are people from all over the world and if you walk from one end of the office to the other, you will hear a minimum 3 languages being spoken around you :) In a way, it is a continuation of the Euroculture culture for me and that's one of the reasons I feel so comfortable at work.
I guess that's a good enough update to start with. More about life in London soon. Now waiting to hear from the other interns about their exciting internships!
