Travel stories

IMPRESSION OF THE COUNTRY

Emden is a city with around 50,000 inhabitants. It has interesting museums like the Emden History Museum and the East Frisian Museum, as well as a museum of contemporary art. One of the things I liked most about Germany was the emphasis on recycling: when you buy a plastic bottle, you pay an extra 20 cents, which is refunded when you return the bottle to the proper recycling machine.

CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

One very interesting activity was the International Evenings. Every so often, international students from a specific country would gather, give a presentation about their country, and prepare typical food. We also used the semester ticket to travel to various places during weekends or in our free time.

Arrival at Emden University

We worked at Hochschule Emden/Leer under the supervision of Menno. Our schedule was from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and we were given a laboratory as our workspace. We had no problems using university facilities like printers or the library. During the first few weeks, we participated in the Orientation Weeks. On the first day, we had a welcome lunch where we introduced ourselves and talked about the Erasmus experience. That same day, we also had an afternoon snack to get to know each other better.

On the second day, we visited the local museum about Emden’s history, and in the afternoon, we went bowling. The next day, we visited the city of Hamburg, and the day after that, we went to the Dutch city of Groningen. Over the following days, we took intensive German language courses. This lasted until September 24th, when we began speaking with Menno, a university staff member who guided us in the project.

Menno explained how the university’s network and virtual machine system worked, as well as the project's features.

Project Overview

My project consisted of developing a WordPress plugin that allows users to create social media posts directly from the post creation screen. The aim of the project was to save the editors time and allow them to post on social media without needing direct access to login credentials. This would also boost the university’s social media presence. The plugin was not intended for public use but only for internal use by Hochschule Emden/Leer.

In this project, I worked full-stack since I developed both the WordPress plugin and the API calls to the social network I implemented. The reason I only implemented one network (Twitter) was because Menno asked me to focus more on clean code structure and clear documentation than on completing the full application. This project is meant to be continued by other students in the future.

Personal Reflection

I learned a lot during this internship. It allowed me to start a project from scratch, where I had to work across various areas of web development. I also really appreciated having the freedom to make important decisions regarding different parts of the project.