Great Summer Semester 2015

After spending full Academic year in RheinAhrCampus as an Erasmus student, looking back I can see the endeavours on my time line.

The Summer Semester 2015 was all about attending German language intensive course, working as an Intern in Sprachen / Internationales at Rhein AhrCampus and writing my Master Thesis.

German Language Course

This was an intensive course I attended four times a week, three hours a day for six months. This kind of devoted language studying brought me to the B1 level, starting from zero. I was amused to find that my score on the final exam was 95%. That motivated me to take my next step and that is to reach C1 level in the next few months.

Sprachen / Internationales Academic Internship

Though I have several years of experience in Business and Tourism, working for Sprachen / Internationales RAC Department and Dr. Elmar-Laurent Borgmann was a beneficial experience. One gets the best results out of the work done once one enjoys what one is doing. This is how it was for me to help in organizing International Week. International Week is traditionally a week at RheinAhrCampus where representatives of different partner universities from all over the world and Europe come for a visit, represent their universities and give lectures. I was in charge of guest relations, where I was coordinating guests from 10 different countries. Consequently working in such a great team of academics and lecturers: Dr. Borgmann, Andreas Faulstisch, Barbara Neukirchen and Dr. Rashimah Rajah brought me to the next project: E-learning. At the moment I’m working on this project and looking forward to see the results of the work Mr. Faulstisch, Tanja Höpfl and myself did.

Master Thesis

Noticing ‘Selfie fever’ happening around me and being a Master of Communications student, I decided to write my Master Thesis on that particular subject: Selfies.Communication by images becomes a phenomenon. We text less, and as a replacement for it we send images. Often we post those images on one of the Social Media platforms that we use. This way we send a message of where we are, whom we are with and what we are doing. Whether you are aware of it or not, selfies surely has become part of our daily routine. This was an extensive research work load where I had a chance to conduct an online survey where 214 people from 40 different countries of the world participated, plus another 10 interviewees coming from 8 different countries shared their opinions, experiences and ways of seeing on the subject of selfies. For curious ones my Thesis about Selfies is reachable on Academi.edu (academic social network).

Reward

As a reward, a group of students and myself visited European Parliament in Brussels. Thanks to Prof. Schaumann who organised the visit, we were welcomed by several high-ranked German politicians who gave us inside impression of the EU parliament organisation and the work they personally are in-charge of. This part of their PR activities was followed by answering our questions.

Looking back this was a great semester with many new accomplishments achieved.

In conclusion I need to say I am happy and grateful to have all this things done in the past several months in RheinAhrCampus in Remagen, Germany.

Future Exchange, International, Erasmus students of RAC - I highly encourage you to do similar or the same!

Zrinka