This week I am going to take a few moments to talk about something that I’m sure everyone in the PLA has neglected at one point or another: self-care.
This summer has been amazing so far -- I am loving my internship and living in New York. But I learned the hard way the past two days that just because you are happy, doesn’t mean you can’t be stressed. Stress is often associated with negative emotions because the two so often coincide, but you can overwork yourself even when you’re enjoying it. It’s just harder to notice, and for me, I tend to associate summer with relaxation and school with stress, so I didn’t realize that I was maybe, just maybe overdoing it until I came back from my lunch break on Tuesday and realized I could barely sit up straight, I felt so exhausted. After muddling through another unproductive hour of the afternoon, I gave in and decided I would go work from home. My boss is still in Germany, and we had already had our daily phone call about all of my assignments, so it wasn’t an issue for me to work remotely. However, when I reached my apartment, I barely was able to post the article I had been working on before I fell asleep. In retrospect, I am not surprised. We had guests visiting for most of the weekend, which meant that there was little downtime, and I ended up having to finish all the homework for my online class on Sunday afternoon when I was already feeling exhausted. Monday night I had forced myself to work ahead for the next week because I am going out of town, and tried to complete some of the coding I am working on for a PhD student in the German department. In addition to my schoolwork and internship, I am also working on a novel with my cousin, and I was feeling pressure to meet our next internal deadline, which was supposed to be Tuesday evening. But ultimately, when I was in a puddle on Tuesday, I realized I had to take a break. I emailed my boss Wednesday morning and he said it was absolutely fine for me to take the day off, and then I slept almost the entire day. Note to self: do not do that again. And while I have been eating well and exercising regularly, I guess it’s important to also realize the physical strain that so many mental pressures can put on you, even if you are feeling happy with your situation. An off-topic anecdote to brighten the day in the wake of the news that Germany was eliminated from the World Cup and that Justice Kennedy is resigning: I discovered this amazing campaign called the Billion Oyster Project, which is organized by a high school here in New York and is aiming to restore 1 billion oysters to the New York harbor system by 2035. This looks like an amazing project and I really hope to be involved some day, although their current volunteer days are on weekdays, which conflict with my work schedule. They do have opportunities for you to set up a larger volunteering session building reefs or helping with the project if you are with a group, which could be a cool opportunity for PLA in a few years when they return to New York City.
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As a Penn State student, a strong and passionate alumni network is a force that I have come to taken as a given. The number of dedicated alumni is evident every football weekend in the fall as thousands of former students descend upon their alma mater, in the enthusiastic "We are!" cries you can hear around the globe, or the commitment to giving back to the University with generous gifts like that which funded the Presidential Leadership Academy. While I knew that Penn State's alumni network is half a million strong and has been voted the number one alumni network in the country, I had never really stopped to think about why that works or how it has gotten to that point, until a discussion that took place in my office last week.
A number of the German universities in my office, including Freiburg, are working to develop substantial alumni networks, but the system that is so commonplace in the United States has not been a traditional part of German culture. Much of my work over the past week has been alumni development work -- contacting alumni by email and LinkedIn and requesting they update their profiles in Freiburg's database, sending out "Save the Dates" for a reunion weekend in July, and researching and reaching out to potential ambassadors that could serve as points of contact for each state. The database for Freiburg's North American alumni is by no means a complete source of information, and in almost all cases I had to supplement my research through LinkedIn. Nevertheless, I persisted because my boss, Dr. Lemmens, is working hard to bring some of the fierce sense of connection that drives American universities to Freiburg by building this essential infrastructure. Several other universities within the consulate are employing similar tactics, but the directors for the universities shared similar frustrations or wonder about how to really inspire passionate and dedicated connections to the Universities. While they identified a sense of elitism that can fuel alumni connections to prestigious universities -- people are excited to be a part of an exclusive network, and therefore more inclined to flaunt these connections or utilize them -- they were running into issues figuring out how to drive excitement in connecting to a network that prides itself in the variety of people it serves an options it offers. This second option sounded a lot like Penn State to me, and while I know that I find the alumni network a valuable resource in terms of professional development, that still doesn't explain to me why the Penn State alumni network functions stands out above other similarly-sized American universities. I don't think that the desire to connect with alumni for professional reasons is unique to Penn State, but I have been told by employers and articles that they are often astounded with how dedicated Penn State alumni are to helping out their fellow Penn Staters. The German university directors pointed to sports as a strong source of "Korpsgeist" -- literally, "corps spirit" or strong sense of belonging and pride in a group -- that drives American university alumni but does not exist at German universities because of a lack of college athletics. It is undoubtable that the "Korpsgeist" inspired by Penn State football is a huge draw for many, many Penn State alumni, but I still refuse to believe this is the only reason we have a successful alumni network. Plenty of other schools have alumni who are passionate about sports -- Clemson, Alabama, Ohio State, or Michigan, but they don't rank as highly as Penn State. Furthermore, I know plenty of successful students that don't care one way or the other about Penn State football who I am sure would still happily serve as a professional resource for future Penn Staters. Many of these students do have strong connections with other student organizations that they participated in while at Penn State and built prevalent personal memories. Maybe this is where German universities are lacking -- while my experience was certainly different as a one-semester exchange student, I still know that I found considerably fewer clubs at Freiburg, and because there was no on-campus living, I think students build less of a school-centered identity or sense of community, and tend to live life in a more every-day, true to "real-life" fashion. Perhaps this has a formative impact in later years? I'm interested to hear any thoughts that people would like to share! The second week of my internship has been extremely eventful. This week, on Wednesday, my office and the German Center for Research and Innovation were hosting an expert breakfast as well as a larger, panel event on the topic of precision medicine. Basically, precision medicine is a new field of research that looks at treating diseases, such as cancer, by targeting and attempting to repair the certain gene that is being attacked or destroyed, and therefore the disease is classified by the gene it affects rather than by the site affected. The conference we hosted brought together experts to discuss how to tackle some of the challenges associated with precision medicine.
These challenges are linked to the complexity of genetics, and include the fact that it can be very difficult to isolate a certain gene as the cause of a cancer — because many other factors within each person’s body can influence has the disease affects them, but this might not be discernible in isolated lab tests. Additionally, when working to fix a specific mutation, it might turn out that the “cure” for that mutation is only specific to a very small pool of people affected with that specific affliction, so it’s difficult to make it a cost-efficient solution, or to test its effectiveness on a large enough sample of patients. Because each person’s genetic code is so complicated, it can also be expensive to test for a person’s code, especially because it can change and evolve, which would require multiple testings over the course of time. Furthermore, saving this genetic information leads into a whole range of ethical questions about where the information should be stored and who has access to it. Finally, there are challenges because of how quickly cancer can evolve and adapt — a solution that works at one point may become impotent if the cancer mutates, making it harder on patients who have to run all of this expensive testing just to have it change. While my academic interests are largely based in the social rather than the natural sciences, I found it extremely interesting to think about the many interdisciplinary angles of precision medicine. This issue cannot be solved only by the scientists and doctors doing research; it also involves the tech wizards who might implement blockchain technology, or create better and more secure ways of saving genetic data. It involves the lawyers and policymakers and economists who will figure out how to create a new system of healthcare that can deal with the higher costs of precision medicine and provide access to patients in need, all while operating within the systems of different nations. It also requires policymakers to fund education and realize the importance of research, supporting younger researchers so they can gain enough experience to conduct more in-depth research needed for this field. One of the challenges that the scientists in the room spoke about was the lack of sustained funding that they faced, which — both in America and in Germany — made it harder to have grad students or post-docs that could afford to work in the same lab for enough years to get beyond learning basic protocol and conduct the high level research with the degree of accuracy demanded by their fields. Under the current system, most postdocs and grad students were forced to move on to other positions for financial reasons, and could not spend seven or eight years in the same lab, which meant that research groups were forced to invest more time in training new people with the basic skills for the lab rather than working on more advanced skills. This discussion between professionals of all different fields — large Pharma companies, insurance lawyers, esteemed scientists, grad students, government bureaucrats, university representatives, and even medical startups — reminded me of the kind of conversations that PLA works to initiate, and it was fascinating to watch this multidisciplinary approach in action in the “real” world working to solve important problems like how to defeat cancer. On Friday, I concluded my first week of my internship experience at the Liaison Office of the University of Freiburg and Eucor for North America, which is located in the German consulate in New York. Although I have only been there a short while, it has already been an exciting and engaging experience, and I think it will serve as a wonderful capstone experience for my master’s program with the School of International Affairs.
I have been fortunate enough to work with the amazing director of the New York Liaison Office, Dr. Markus Lemmens, who has been kind, enthusiastic, and patient. He and the other members of my office speak with me almost entirely in German, which is already proving to be incredibly beneficial for my German skills. Furthermore, this kind of immersion was something I feared I could only experience by returning to Germany for some period of time, but in many ways my experience working at the German consulate had proved much more beneficial in terms of practical development of my language skills. Utilizing my German skills in the work environment is giving me a chance to build my professional vocabulary and strengthen office and business skills that will serve me well in any future job entailing German communication. When I interviewed for several positions this past spring, one question that arose did concern the extent of my experience and comfort level using German in a professional environment, and thanks to this internship, I feel that I am steadily increasing my skills in this field in a way that travel or even academic study in Germany did not provide the opportunity to do. Additionally, working in a German organization in the United States allows me to avoid the trap that so often captures many Americans that go abroad to try and work on their language skills — I am not enthusiastically approached by people hoping to work on their English skills. One of the greatest challenges I faced when I was studying abroad was the fact that many Europeans or other students I met were just as eager to practice their English as they were their German (or, if they were native Germans, to use their English) so they would switch to speaking to me in English rather than patiently allow me to try and practice my German. Furthermore, when I was living within communities of exchange students, even those whose first language wasn’t English were often more comfortable in their English skills than their German and would default to using English as the common language to cross language barriers between cultures, stranding me in an area of utilizing my native language rather than building any of my foreign language skills. Here, however, I’m not the only American insight; besides the normality of using German as the working language because almost every one else who works there is German, there are plenty of opportunities for my colleagues to step outside the building and put their own English skills to use. Markus has been great about identifying a number of areas of professional skills for me to develop over the course of the summer, and has assigned me projects to work on these skills, which include marketing and professional relationship development, journalistic writing, event logistics, and fundraising. I am excited to report on my experiences with each of these specific areas of interest as the summer progresses. |