Eight weeks ago I found myself sitting in Glasgow International Airport, fidgeting nervously and impatiently burning up the last of my free mobile web access.  I am not normally one for the nerves, I have been so fortunate to have travelled extensively enough in my youth that on family holidays I have the honour of being The One Who Holds The Passports.  In addition I am not a stranger to experiencing large companies, having done brief work experience turns with the BBC and IBM in secondary school and working for telecoms giant O2 for around a year and a half.  But my previous short internships were fleeting must-be-dones within my school’s curriculum, and my O2 job was part-time – a student necessity to fund the weekends (I mean books…).

But the Saltire Foundation opportunity was to be different.  The Saltire Foundation is an initiative of the Scottish government aimed at “promoting and developing Scotland’s rich pool of up-and-coming business talent”.  One method in which it does this is to offer internships to students from Scotland’s universities at large international companies around the world.  Keen to gain an insight into the professional world of my chosen university course – marketing and international business – I applied for one of the internships being offered by Bilfinger Berger AG of Germany in its Group Communications division.  After an online vetting, face-to-face and telephone interview process I was delighted to be told that I would be going to Germany to join the communications team for 8 weeks during the summer.

And thus I found myself flying to the Bundesrepublik with two other Bilfinger Berger interns, with mixed expectations and a good slew of enthusiasm.  Upon landing at Frankfurt airport we were honoured enough to be greeted by Ken Reid, a member of the Board of Directors of Bilfinger Berger, a GlobalScot and the ultimate reason that we were here.  The following morning I was driven to the nearby city of Mannheim on the Baden-Wurttemberg-Palatinate-Hessian border where the Group’s corporate headquarters are located.  I met the team that I would be working with in Communications and learned that there was also another intern, from Germany, who was also spending the first two weeks at Group Communications.

During the course of the subsequent eight weeks I have learned a lot about marketing and communications.  The first few weeks were a struggle with the language (the comms team work mainly in German), although I was thankful to have the assistance of Caro, the German intern who spoke flawless English (with a Canadian accent, in fact).  One of the ongoing projects I have had is to help the team complete their Media Library – a vast online catalogue of high resolution images of the company’s projects and services.  Sometimes this required hunting through corporate history books and trawling the internet for information as some of the projects were completed before the current IT infrastructure was in place and the internal project databases turned up no results.

Asides from this I have seen how the company disseminates its information to its customers and employees, from the management of the information on the corporate intranet through to carefully constructed newsletters.  I have been involved in the translation of news articles, adverts, corporate promotional literature and emails for communication to the Group’s far flung international subsidiaries.

Early on in my internship I had the opportunity to help in the creation of an advert for the company, which was great.  I have also seen how the company is developing its identity, having expanded in size relatively quickly over recent years, I was tasked with checking the websites (and later the intranets) of various subsidiaries to see if they conformed to the developing Corporate Design standards.  It was through this that I began to understand how large the company was.  Bilfinger Berger operates under dozens of brands, priding itself on a highly decentralized command structure and so it is considerably larger than first meets the eye.

One of the highlights of my internship has to be paying a visit to the city of Saarbrücken in the western federal state of Saarland.  Here were the headquarters of a company which produced promotional items and branded items for Bilfinger Berger.  Early on in our day I managed to discern that Bilfinger Berger was a valued client of theirs, and it was the manager of the company himself who took us to lunch then showed us around the ‘display room’ of the company, showing what products they would provide for us to promote ourselves.

Another aspect which I have been involved in is the company’s internal magazine.  This is a twice yearly affair which takes a lot of preparation and cooperation from colleagues around the world.  I was able to visit an agency which specialised in designing and producing such magazines and gained an insight into the more journalistic side of marketing.  Another task was to read one of the daily newspapers every morning for mention of Bilfinger Berger or its competitors and to trawl news collation websites such as Google News for English language articles published online.  I was also able to listen into a telephone conference between the Chairman of the board of directors and members of the media and have been able to see some of the PR aspects of the industry.

Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience here in Mannheim.  I came with mixed expectations and whilst my internship has not been what I expected, in no way would I consider that a negative thing.  My internship has widened my perspective of marketing, clarified some of the opportunities available to me after graduation and has made me clearer in my own mind some of the ideas of what I would like to do in my professional career.

On a more social note I was lucky enough to have two friends who came to Mannheim three weeks into my internship to start an Erasmus year at the university here.  Through them I have made friends and am now eagerly looking forward to starting my own Erasmus year in Switzerland, just after I finish here.  Germany is a country which I have always thought of visiting and seeing but would have considered it below other countries.  Having lived here for 2 months I must say that the German people are a very welcoming people, even the tram station next to my accommodation has “Welcome to Vogelstang” scrawled across the pillars of the elevated tramlines with a spray can.  Not only is the graffiti polite, it is also written in a foreign language with rather good grammar!