My AIESEC Internship in Kaiserslautern

This is Barış from Turkey and I completed a 6-month internship in Kaiserslautern at German Centre of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in the field of software development. That was an extremely didactic, pleasant and unique period of time which includes unforgettable memories.

In Freiburg, while struggling with a map :)

Kaiserslautern is a small city and interns generally reside out of town, nearby the university, as well as most of the students. In this area, there are some famous research companies and DFKI is one of them. There were many international interns at the company and it was such a relax and warm environment. All of the employers of the company were very kind and helpful and this helped me very much during my orientation period to the company and to the city as well.

During my internship, I participated in the project named "iGreen" which will provide an improvement in the field of agriculture to increase the productivity to the top level. I developed a web project so that the farmers could see the process of the fields on a map according to the data recorded during the processing via some special devices. This gives the farmers the ability of visualizing their fields in a grid form and controlling the products they used. In the next steps of the project, the system will tell some "smart" tips to the farmers, like most suitable time for planting/harvesting time. Honestly, I feel a kind of sad not to see the next steps of iGreen, but it feels so cool to be part of a "future project" which will be used around the whole Germany :)

For me, experiencing the German culture, traditions and lifestyle was one of the most important aspects of my stay in Germany and it is getting hard to face the uniqueness in big cities. Kaiserslautern has a story to tell you and I am pretty satisfied with fulfilling my intention about this subject. Besides, thanks to the university, there’s a multicultural environment in this part of the city and I have many friends from many different nations. Sometimes we used to arrange dinner parties in which each person cooked a typical food from his/her own country. I already miss those conversations, sharing our food, traditions, ideas, stories and all that is what is called as "friendship".

Maybe one single disappointment about my internship: it was from September to March, which corresponds to the coldest time interval of Europe. I travelled into some cities/towns nearby, like Heidelberg, Trier, Freiburg, Speyer, Cologne and some other countries like Switzerland, France, Italy. They were all really nice trips, although (mostly) in cold weather. It’d have been easier to travel in a warmer period. Besides, the AIESEC conferences, reception weekends and some famous festivals in different cities, occur more often in the seasons of spring and summer.

Thank you to all AIESEC Kaiserslautern family for their help before and during my internship period. That was a priceless experience for me that I will remember forever.

AIESECers in Speyer!