half a month in Bonn
yes, indeed. i have been here for 2 weeks and 1 day.
i thought i wouldn't miss the food back home. now i'm proven very wrong. even though i like potatoes and sausages, i miss the japanese food (cheap and yummy), the availability of cuisines. i miss having things at my doorstep - think of heartland malls like tampines one and tampines mall. i have to travel farther away to cities like Cologne to purchase nicer-looking goods.
so while i'm occasionally missing some usual foods here, i am busy working away. fridays are usually the quiet days in the office - but it is astonishingly quiet. people leave the office by 3pm, and you can hardly see a soul in the entire office building by 6pm. it's unlike singapore or other places in asia; even though in these countries friday is a tad slower than our usual fast work pace, we still leave around 5pm earliest.
on this very friday, when all my colleagues are out of the office, i am scurrying to finish my work. work can never be finished, i know, but i just took on my role. my position is called coordinator for a reason (and i'm in Talent Sourcing department for yet another reason ;) )- and this week was my first week flying solo and doing actual stuff.
what have i been doing the entire week?
when i enter the office, there is a long string of emails awaiting my attention. most of the time, i am on the phone with colleagues overseas (hiring is for all around the world), figuring out how to solve our hiring problems and managing expectations with managers. other times i am slotting candidates into interview time slots. to sum it up, it's stakeholder management - the hiring manager, AIESEC, the applicant, the HR personnel... the list goes on.
in the afternoon, my lunch breaks are typically spent with other interns. we are a diverse bunch - ranging from romanians, kenyan, slovakia to china. once it was amusing seeing a czech guy sitting opposite a slovak; and both talking about how they used to be one country (czechoslovakia). we sometimes have lunch with the interns from Deutsche Telekom, another company, from across the street from us. networking is usually a normal scenario for us!
once lunch is over, i swing back into action with my emails and phone calls.
the above seems so simple in words, but doing it is a completely different experience - way much more intense. since each person joining us is at a completely separate stage of the process, i must make sure i am on top of things and reducing the possibility of a mistake to almost zero percent.
yet at the same time, i still have space to breathe. and i am thankful bonn has this slow, nice peaceful pace - i don't speak as fast as i did in singapore. i am more patient.. i guess being away from singapore for a while does me some good.
i thought i wouldn't miss the food back home. now i'm proven very wrong. even though i like potatoes and sausages, i miss the japanese food (cheap and yummy), the availability of cuisines. i miss having things at my doorstep - think of heartland malls like tampines one and tampines mall. i have to travel farther away to cities like Cologne to purchase nicer-looking goods.
so while i'm occasionally missing some usual foods here, i am busy working away. fridays are usually the quiet days in the office - but it is astonishingly quiet. people leave the office by 3pm, and you can hardly see a soul in the entire office building by 6pm. it's unlike singapore or other places in asia; even though in these countries friday is a tad slower than our usual fast work pace, we still leave around 5pm earliest.
on this very friday, when all my colleagues are out of the office, i am scurrying to finish my work. work can never be finished, i know, but i just took on my role. my position is called coordinator for a reason (and i'm in Talent Sourcing department for yet another reason ;) )- and this week was my first week flying solo and doing actual stuff.
what have i been doing the entire week?
when i enter the office, there is a long string of emails awaiting my attention. most of the time, i am on the phone with colleagues overseas (hiring is for all around the world), figuring out how to solve our hiring problems and managing expectations with managers. other times i am slotting candidates into interview time slots. to sum it up, it's stakeholder management - the hiring manager, AIESEC, the applicant, the HR personnel... the list goes on.
in the afternoon, my lunch breaks are typically spent with other interns. we are a diverse bunch - ranging from romanians, kenyan, slovakia to china. once it was amusing seeing a czech guy sitting opposite a slovak; and both talking about how they used to be one country (czechoslovakia). we sometimes have lunch with the interns from Deutsche Telekom, another company, from across the street from us. networking is usually a normal scenario for us!
once lunch is over, i swing back into action with my emails and phone calls.
the above seems so simple in words, but doing it is a completely different experience - way much more intense. since each person joining us is at a completely separate stage of the process, i must make sure i am on top of things and reducing the possibility of a mistake to almost zero percent.
yet at the same time, i still have space to breathe. and i am thankful bonn has this slow, nice peaceful pace - i don't speak as fast as i did in singapore. i am more patient.. i guess being away from singapore for a while does me some good.
