Hello everyone, I am Ena Dadić from Croatia, and I had the opportunity to undertake an internship at the company Messer SE & Co. KGaA in Krefeld, Germany. I was one of the 63 scholarship holders of the very special and jubilar 20th generation of the Internship Programme of German Business in the year 2023.
Messer is one of the European and World leaders in industrial gases and the only family-owned company of that type in Europe In the beginning, I wasn’t really sure what that means, but within few weeks spent in the company I realised that it translates into work environment, people are willing to help you and invest their time to show you different fields in order to participate in the “success story” that has been lasting for 125 years now.
From July 3rd to the end of December 2023, I lived in Krefeld. This town is so small that they don’t even print post cards. They just sell the ones from Düsseldorf which is just 45 minutes away. However, the location of the town is amazing. Apart from its large and beautiful park and lovely churches, it provides you the opportunity to explore the area because of its great connection to the airport, bus stations and railway stations. It is just 40 minutes away from Venlo in the Netherlands, and it is located in between Dusseldorf and Cologne.
Working in Messer was a really great experience. They usually don’t take a lot of interns a year because they want to do the best training for each, so there were only two of us. The behaviour towards interns is not different from a regular employee that just started. From the second week I started to do real projects for real clients in their technical innovation centre. It was a little bit scary at first but great for boosting my confidence and knowledge. During my six-month internship, I participated in business meetings and field work, as well as business trips and field related fairs, so it wasn’t a typical Chemical Engineering intern job.
The benefit of life in a small town was that I didn’t have to wake up so early and I would still be on time. On my typical day I would wake up around 8 o’clock and finish around 18 o’clock. During the weekends I would travel around to meet the other scholarship holders or with my roommate, colleagues or even by myself.
I would wake up early on Saturday and go to the “Hauptbahnhof” and search the places I could go. The best part of travelling with other scholarship holders from the Internship Programme of German Business was exploring because everyone had some tips or tricks to specific locations and being able to sleep in the train after a long day. So many of us also became great budget travel planners.
I really like how life is in Germany. From my experience it is not like everyone says and it really helps you to appreciate what you usually take for granted, in my case the sun.
Ena Dadic, generation 2023