Sander Winkel, s3762467
Placement provider: Illicit Trade Group
Placement coordinator: drs. H. (Erik) Sportel
Table of contents
Introduction --- 2
Finding / choosing an internship --- 2
Preparing for my first meeting with ITG --- 2
Preparing for the internship --- 3
About ITG --- 4
Overview of activities I was involved in --- 4
The first couple of weeks --- 4
The first slightly bigger project: CESS --- 6
ITG events and social media --- 6
Research project --- 8
COST Action grant application --- 8
The January 2021 Illicit Trade Winter School --- 9
Conclusion --- 12
Connection between ITG and my MA IR program --- 12
Looking ahead --- 12
Motivatiebrief tips
Allemaal in eerste paragraaf:
Begin met de organisatie en enige voorbeelden van wat het doet Analyse van dit: ik vind het goed
Waarom ik geschikt ben
Introduction
This report is about my internship at the Illicit Trade Group, an interdisciplinary research group that is connected to the University of Groningen. I was with the Illicit Trade Group on a part-time basis from September 2020 until January 2021. This report will be both descriptive in the sense that it describes the activities that I was involved in during the placement, and reflective because I will also reflect on how I experienced these activities and related processes. I will do both of these things simultaneously and base the structure of the placement report mostly on the issues mentioned on page 12 and 13 of the placement course guide, as well as on the projects I was working on during the five months of my internship at the Illicit Trade Group (ITG). I will also try to describe and reflect on my activities chronologically when I can.
Finding / choosing an internship
Doing an internship at ITG was actually not exactly what I had envisioned when I originally started to look around for internship opportunities. Not because of the subject of ‘illicit trade’, but because of the fact that I initially wanted to do an internship at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, this desire had existed even before I started looking for an internship in the IR Master program as it was already present when I wanted to do an
internship for the MA Middle Eastern Studies I was doing at the RUG. At the time, a number of rejected internship applications at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly revealed to me that it was very difficult to do an internship there unless you really stood out from other applicants. Having received feedback on my applications and having contacted applicants that actually did make it into positions that I was rejected for, the main trend I observed was a demand for ‘excellent’ students that also already have a lot of extracurricular experiences. I consider myself slightly above average when it comes to both, although likely not the best among the 40 or 50 people that would usually apply, and so I kept trying in the hope that I would get lucky with one of the applications because of a specific experience I have or because of something I mentioned in my motivation letter. However, a couple dozen
applications later I still was not accepted to any of them and with the deadline for finding an internship drawing closer, I decided to look outside of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for other opportunities. This is when I came across the opportunity to do a placement at ITG.
While I have often researched topics related to the MENA region, I have also always been interested in the issues of security, conflicts, and the impact of both on society. Illicit trade specifically was an issue that I occasionally touched upon when writing research papers as it was often one of the things that seemed to be prevalent in conflict-ridden
contexts. As a result, I decided to look into the opportunity at ITG. I saw that the description of the internship was very much content-based in the fact that it focused on actually dealing with relevant academic literature and less with things such as partnerships / public relations and organizing (internal) events which I had previously often associated with ‘typical
internships’. In hindsight, this distinction was much less obvious in the internship that I ended up doing and I actually ended up getting most of my satisfaction out of the activities related to the organizing of events and communicating with people outside of the ITG group, but more on that later.
Preparing for my first meeting with ITG
After writing my first motivation letter for an internship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I usually slightly adapted the letter for the other specific functions I was applying for. The core of the letter slightly changed over time as I added new experiences, and rephrased and removed certain sections, but it remained mostly the same. Also for the ITG application, I slightly changed my letter to better highlight my familiarity with the topic of illicit trade and I submitted the application via email. Not long after that, I was invited to an online video meeting with the coordinators of the group, Francesco and Pim, to discuss what I could do for them as an intern for ITG. Things became much more concrete rather quickly during this meeting as we already started discussing things as if I was already responsible for them. In other words, there was not really a specific point where I went from being an applicant to an intern. I guess this meant that I would have needed to explicitly withdraw my application if I still wanted to get out of doing the internship anymore, although this was never really
something I considered. My preparation for this first meeting was fairly straightforward due to the fact that I did not have much information about ITG. I looked at what the application said exactly and thought about how some of the things there would work in practice. I also looked up who Francesco and Pim were. Now that the ITG website is live (it launched shortly after I started my internship), future interns will probably be able to get a lot more information about ITG prior to their first meeting.
Preparing for the internship
Once it became clear to me that I was about to do the internship at ITG, I started preparing mostly by diving into the topic of illicit trade. I did not really have to prepare a lot of logistical things because the internship was starting online because of the pandemic. There were also no financial issues I had to take care of because the internship was not paid. It was indicated to me that we could work offline as well as soon as the pandemic would become less of an issue, but this never became a possibility as the pandemic continued throughout the entire internship. As a result, the fact that I could immediately focus purely on the actual content of the internship was quite nice and I started reading about different kinds of illicit trade and watching lectures to familiarize myself with the topic. ITG also let me attend one of the last meetings with the previous interns to get a better idea of what ITG was doing exactly at that point in time, and I had a 1-on-1 meeting with an intern whose
responsibilities I would partly adopt. In the end, I did not actually end up doing many of the same things as this intern had done because of the nature of the work at ITG, which is mostly structured around projects that we would doing at a certain point in time, but I did become a bit more familiar with the activities of ITG.
Still, a lot of things remained fairly unclear to me because there were a lot of details, names, and mentions of things that had happened in the past that only seemed to make things more complicated. I also often did not really know what questions to ask that would
make things more clear for me, so I determined that my best strategy would be to mostly observe at first and get a better idea of everything that is going on that way. I noticed recently (January 2021) that the intern who will, in turn, take over from me had quite a lot of questions that seemed to be about every single detail that he did not yet fully understand because he still lacked the contextual knowledge. I am not completely sure which way of doing things is the best in this regard.
I also think that my method of mostly observing things and asking questions when I wanted to know how things might be connected, instead of asking much more, seemingly trivial, questions was also reflected in my general expectations of the internship. Everything that was in the application was fairly abstract, so I actually did not have a lot of specific expectations regarding my activities during the internship. However, I did immediately experience a heightened degree of seriousness compared to other things that I had done before, including studying at university, working as a waiter (and a few other working experiences), and even some of the volunteering I had done, and that I am still doing, for Aiesec and the Embassy of Yemen. I cared for the things that I mention here and I knew that they mattered, but I felt as if this internship really mattered compared to these things.
About ITG
The Illicit Trade Group consisted of six people when I joined the group in September 2020. Two of them, Dr. Francesco Giumelli and Dr. Pim Geelhoed, are the coordinators of the group and concern themselves mainly with the big picture in terms of what the group is doing. Then there is the project manager, Chiara Magrelli, who managed the different projects we were doing by giving everyone their roles and responsibilities in these specific projects. Finally, there were three interns of which I was one. While there was a clear hierarchical structure from the coordinators, to the project manager, to the interns when you started a project, in my experience this increasingly disappeared as time went on because you were usually responsible for something quite specific and eventually started to know more about this thing than the other members of the group. I can go into this in more detail when discussing some of the specific projects I was involved in.
The group as a whole tries to be a kind of research hub for researchers (and practitioners) that are doing something related to illicit trade. It brings different researchers into contact with each other, which often caused them to be surprised that many of their co-workers were also doing something related to illicit trade, which is not a major surprise in itself as it can be quite a broad topic depending on how you interpret it. Some of the
activities of ITG include the building of a network of researchers with regular (online)
meetings, collectively applying for different grants, organizing of winter and summer schools as well as other types of public events, and organizing research in the field of illicit trade. This general overview of what the Illicit Trade Group is, was never explicitly stated to me, but became clear as I was doing the internship.
Overview of activities I was involved in
The first couple of weeks
I remember that I initially thought that there were a number of specific tasks or activities laid out for me that I would mostly be working on during the internship. In hindsight and knowing more about ITG, this was never really how it was going to be. Because of the nature of the work that the group is doing, which is very project-based, the entire group will shift its focus when needed, which also causes the responsibilities of the interns to move along with it. Eventually I ended up doing things that were mostly different from what the
content intern before me had done. I also indicated to the intern who would take over from me that he can expect the same thing to happen. Looking at my notes of the first few meetings with the group, it is clear that the coordinators and project manager were still kind of brainstorming in terms of what I was going to be doing. As I said before, I thought that they would already have a very clear idea of what I would be doing with them when I started. As a result, I initially tried to take their instructions quite literally and tried to work on the things they would indicate to me that they would like me to be working on. However, this was quite difficult because the things they said were quite vague. They were more like general ideas, rather than clear instructions. This was definitely an issue where the things that I had expected did not align with what was actually happening. In hindsight, they were just
introducing these ideas to me so that I would gradually understand what the group is doing and perhaps they even expected me to take some initiative and actually do something with the ideas that they introduced. To be fair, I could not really have taken a lot of initiative because there were still a lot of unknown details to me in every aspect, but I was not even aware of the fact that it was mostly up to me to take initiative. I definitely improved in this aspect further along in the internship in the context of some of the other activities I started being involved in.
Some examples of such ‘vague ideas’ that they expressed included their desire to add events that are somehow related to illicit trade to the ITG website, to improve our social media presence, and to reach out to members of our network so that we could highlight their research. Reaching out to the Centre for European Security Studies (CESS) was also among the things that I was told to do. The thing is that these ‘instructions’ did not get much more concrete than what I actually wrote down here. Not really understanding what to do with these things, I just started reading and researching a lot and thinking about different possible scenarios, but I did all of this in a mostly passive manner without contacting people or asking a lot of specific questions to Chiara, Francesco and Pim as I was still kind of expecting that they would give me more specific instructions. Also, I did not really know what questions to ask because there were still so many unknowns. Again, I am not sure how much initiative I could have taken at that stage and I did learn a lot about ITG’s activities as I was orienting myself, but I learned that I could at least be a bit more proactive than I
originally was.
Regardless, the result was that I spent quite a lot of hours on ITG-related issues, but that this did not yet result in a lot of concrete things. This mostly concerns the first two or three weeks of my internship. After that, there was an increasing number of smaller, more concrete, things that I was starting to do. We were still fixing a number of minor issues regarding the website, some of which I brought up myself. We were also talking about a kind of mini summer school in the winter, which would eventually become the winter school, and they asked to think more concretely about a program, look for potential speakers, and contact the RUG summer school office. A lot of things remained difficult due to the fact that I often did not really know where to start, but it was already a better experience than before.
The main issue that pretty much summarizes what I experienced at this stage of the internship was communication. I did not always understand what to do with their requests, while I also did not really know what kind of questions to ask that could help clarify things. I clearly remember a specific moment when I did actually take some initiative and improvised a schedule for the upcoming winter school. When I presented this to Francesco, his
response included the following: “it is a bit far from what we talked about.. not even the lunch break... come on, let's get this done well. I see Chiara is working on it as well, but there should be no need for us to work on it.” Although this is the only remotely negative thing that
Francesco or anyone else in ITG ever said to me during the internship, and it is not even that negative to begin with, I really struggled with it for a few days. I had the feeling that I did something wrong and I also felt that his criticism was unjustified because I had simply interpreted things differently. I did not really know how to deal with this. I remember thinking that it was impossible for me to look inside his head to see what he is thinking, so why would I not just think of something myself? I still do not really understand why this made me feel so uncomfortable, but we both explained our thought processes and pretty much left it at that. I also still do not really know what would have been the best way to deal with this. Admittedly, as I am writing it down now, it seems like such a minor issue, but I really struggled with it at the time. I did clearly explain to him why I did what I did, which is good I think in terms of creating clarity in the situation, but perhaps I could have ‘cared’ a little bit less about it
personally. However, how do you convince yourself that something is not a big issue, when it does feel like one for some reason? Still, this is by far the most negative experience I have had during the internship. I think as we worked together for a bit longer we started to better understand what the other was thinking, which made the cooperation much smoother and more rewarding. I guess the online environment (WhatsApp, email and online video meetings) also did take away a lot of the nuance that would be present in an offline
environment. You cannot know with what tone or emotion someone is saying something on WhatsApp or email, which you usually can in a real life conversation.
The first slightly bigger project: CESS
Besides many of the smaller things I was doing for ITG in the first couple of weeks of the internship, it was decided that one of the main projects that I would be working on was the writing of a concept note together with CESS. I was not really familiar with what a concept note was exactly and what the cooperation with CESS had looked like up until that point, so I mostly did what I had done before: I started looking into concept notes and CESS in a mostly passive manner and I would just see what would happen. I did ask the members of the group a number of questions such as what the previous meetings with CESS had looked like, but that did not create much more clarity for me as it became clear that everyone within ITG was also still figuring out what this cooperation would look like. In any case, the plan that followed was that I would attend a series of lectures by Erik Sportel from CESS where grant writing was one of the things that was being discussed. This definitely helped me to get a better idea of what the concept note would have to look like, that an actual project proposal would probably follow it, and that identifying sponsors would also be an important aspect.
These things all helped me construct an initial version of a concept note that talked about capacity building in terms of preparing local stakeholders to combat illicit trade (probably) in Eastern Europe. While there were a number of instances where I received feedback from members of the group and from CESS, and subsequently changed the concept note, in the end it did not feel like a lot of progress was made regarding this project in general. I guess this is because of a number of reasons: I cannot talk for CESS, but it seemed as if they had other things going on at the same time that were given priority, which was definitely also the case for ITG. In fact, I was able to use much of the knowledge I had gained in this context for some of the other ITG activities that would follow, the COST grant application in particular. While I would have preferred more progress in something that I was largely responsible for, I can also live with it because I could see firsthand that we were busy enough with some of the other activities we were involved in that I was partly responsible for as well.
ITG events and social media
One of the other main activities I was responsible for were ITG events and the promotion of these events on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We also made a YouTube channel at some point, though this has a slightly different function than the other four platforms. The main event I was initially responsible for was the ITG launching event in November 2020. I did not make a lot of final decisions, but we collectively agreed on things such as the program and which speakers we wanted to invite. I did write the promotion posts for our social media and presented these to the group after which I would post them on all four platforms. Before this, I had also made a few other posts such as the promotion of events organized by Globalisation Studies Groningen, with whom ITG has a close cooperation.
The social media environment was mostly new to me as I do not have a Twitter or Instagram account myself, while I never really had been active on Facebook. I was somewhat familiar with LinkedIn, but mostly in terms of updating my own profile and not necessarily in terms of following the activity of others. My social media inexperience never really came up, which I did not mind. I thought that it would all be fairly straightforward and this is eventually also what I experienced. Once I saw what kind of language similar
organizations were using, I noticed things such as the almost artificial excitement with which posts are usually written. They would often use exclamation marks and say things that would draw people’s attention. This was all pretty easy to adapt and by the time I started promoting the winter school on social media, I felt as if talking like these things had pretty much
become second-nature. It reminded me a little bit of my time when I worked as a waiter. There you also had to act with an almost fake excitement and soon you really did not know better. Of course, this all sounds a bit as if everything was completely new to me and that I did not know how to express any excitement in an online environment, which is not the case either, but it did contrast quite strongly with the online behavior I was used to.
Besides the ITG launching event, I also helped organize an informal meeting with just the ITG network in which we talked about the research that all the members (about 20) were doing at the time, and towards the end of my internship I also conducted an interview with one of the researchers that is part of our network. This was an idea that had been brought up two or three times during the weekly ITG meetings and I decided to take some initiative in this regard and I approached one of the researchers that we had previously identified as likely to be wanting to do something like that. Chiara was also present during the actual interview, which lasted for about 12 minutes, but she was there just to observe what was going on. After doing a bit of research on the interviewee, I had prepared a number of questions that we could easily adapt to potential further interviews, which would give a little bit of freedom regarding the format of how we would eventually publish these interviews. I talked with both Chiara and the first interviewee about publishing snippets of the interview at first to make it more ‘social media friendly’ and publish the full interview on YouTube later on. There were also a few other ideas that were brought up, but considering that this interview took place towards the end of January, that the winter school would take up all of my time afterwards, and that my internship would end immediately after the winter school, it is now largely up to ITG what they are going to do with the interview(s). Of course, they will ask for my permission when they eventually upload something. I also discussed the interviews with the intern that will take over from me and it seems that he might continue with them in the coming weeks.
It was an interesting experience to do the interview myself as it meant that I really had to know what I was talking about when it comes to illicit trade. In other words, the academic aspect of the internship was really prominent in this regard, although it was also present in many of the other activities I was involved in. For example, some of the smaller tasks I initially had to do included the writing of texts that would be on the ITG website. On the front page, for instance, are three texts about sustainability, safety and security in
relation to illicit trade. To be able to write this, I really had to know about illicit trade and what the current academic discussion revolves around. The same is true for the events I had to help organize (knowing how to make a schedule that reflected such current discussions and knowing which speakers to invite), the grant writing (especially the one for COST as it required me to write a detailed ‘state of the art’ in terms of illicit trade academic research), and the research project I was involved in with Francesco and Lukas Linsi, which I will talk about in the following section.
Research project
After about one month of doing the internship, I was asked by Francesco whether I wanted to participate with him and Lukas Linsi in a research project. They were in the process of wrtiting an academic article in which they question how numbers of global trade, including illicit trade, are often presented as true and reliable. I told them I would be glad to participate and we had a meeting where we discussed the research and how I could
contribute to it. Eventually we had five or six meetings and I ended up with about eight pages of really condensed information and about four pages of actual text that they can use for the final article. If they publish the actual article in the coming months, I think there is a good chance that a small part of it was mostly written by me, which I think is amazing.
It was really interesting to be so closely involved with the writing of an academic article and to actively contribute to it myself. Similar to how Francesco and Pim often talked about big ideas in the context of ITG, which Chiara and the interns would have to bring into practice, Francesco and Lukas Linsi had a similar role regarding this research project and the things that I came up with. I felt a little bit as if I was writing a paper or thesis with really close and detailed supervision. This part of the internship was the most similar to being a student in my experience, but the quality of the text I was writing was of much higher quality than what I usually wrote during my BA and MA programs. I guess this is because of the frequent and detailed feedback I received and I definitely learned from this to occasionally zoom out and really think about what you are doing and which direction to continue in when doing research about something.
One of the things I noticed during the research project meetings with Francesco and Lukas Linsi is that the work I had been doing leading up to the meetings really had to go along with a good presentation of this work. It felt as if I was pitching ideas and that the way I presented these, which did not change the actual content I had produced alongside it, was crucial for how Francesco and Lukas Linsi reacted and what kind of feedback they would give me. In fact, I think that this was also very prevalent in many of the other activities I had been doing for ITG. It was not always a given that the group would do something with the work that I had been doing if I did not somehow give them the idea that it would be useful for them. Again, I felt as if I had to sell my ideas in order for them to be interested in what I had been doing. Of course, I could not just improvise something without having done the
necessary work as they would have surely seen right through this, but it did teach me a lot about presenting your work to others in a situation where everyone is also busy with their own things that are going on.
COST Action grant application
Around mid-November, we applied for a grant called COST Action. I mostly contributed to this in two ways: I helped write the project proposal and I helped identify academics throughout Europe that we could add to the network with which we would submit our application. My main responsibility when it came to the project proposal itself was the ‘state of the art’ or literature review in terms of illicit trade research, which would be followed by a section where we tried to convince the reader that we would be able to fill the gaps that we had identified in the ‘state of the art’. I really had to apply the knowledge that I had gained about illicit trade as an academic field leading up to that point. I also had to take care of the references and the bibliography, which turned out to be quite a lot of work considering the length of the project proposal and the fact that I found out last-minute that there was a maximum number of characters that was allowed for the bibliography. It was not necessarily anyone’s fault that we did not know this, but it still had to be fixed within the few remaining hours before the deadline of submission. I remember that I considered for a split-second not to tell anyone because they could respond to it by saying that it was my fault. However, I immediately reasoned that it had to be fixed anyway and I remember this being a further realization that I was not simply doing what other people told me to do, but that I was part of the team just as much as anyone else and that the end result was just as much my
responsibility as it was theirs. In hindsight, I think that this underlying, though not dominant, consideration that I just had to do what I was told and that then it would just be over with, instead of actually taking initiative myself, is the result of some of the jobs I have had in the past and being a student in general. If you do exactly what the teacher tells you to do, you are likely to get a good grade. Luckily I also have plenty of experience such as in my volunteering activities, but as a student as well where I did what I actually wanted to do, instead of what I sometimes had to do even though this sometimes resulted into a lower grade than would have been possible, and so this is eventually what dominated my behavior in this specific COST example, but also the internship in general. Still, I found it interesting to be aware of this, and I can imagine that this consideration might repeat itself in the future when the bar of acting proactively might be even higher.
The second aspect of the COST Action grant that I was working on most of the time was the identifying of COST partners. These partners did not necessarily have to contribute to the actual project proposal, but we would officially submit it together with them. Even though we only needed to have partners from only about eight different EU countries, Francesco and Pim thought our proposal would be stronger if we had partners from more countries than that. As a result, me and one other intern started looking for academics (and practitioners) throughout Europe that were doing something related to illicit trade. We had quite a lot of names to contact already after some time and we decided that we could aim to have at least one partner in each EU country. This meant that we searched in quite obscure countries such as Moldova or Latvia, which taught me a few useful techniques. Eventually we ended up with over 200 people to contact and we eventually managed to have at least one partner in each EU country, which I found very satisfying.
The entire COST proposal was the first time that we were all constantly working on ITG-related things for a couple of days in a row. They had announced this beforehand: while we had a number of relatively calm weeks, this would be a very busy one. As a result, I was completely fine with this and even thought it was more fulfilling than my previous activities at ITG because there were so clearly direct and visible results of the group’s work. Together with the winter school, this was the only time where we would continue communicating
online extensively outside of working hours, but I remember a very fulfilled feeling when we eventually submitted the project proposal. I really felt proud of the team as a whole and even though we will not hear until sometime in 2021 whether the project proposal has been
approved, this was the first time when I thought that this was really turning into an amazing internship experience. I would say that everything I described in this report up until the COST proposal was accompanied with a more neutral feeling where my experiences in the internship did not really result in significant positive or negative feelings.
The January 2021 Illicit Trade Winter School
The winter school which took place from the 25th of January until the 29th, was my final and favorite activity that I was involved in during my internship. The fact that this was also the only big project where I carried the most responsibility out of all the group members indicates to me that something can become more fulfilling when you have more
responsibility. Admittedly, you could argue that Francesco, Pim and Chiara had more
responsibility than me because they were still my coordinators, but I mean to say mainly that I spent the most time on and was the most involved in all the different things that had to be done for the winter school, which collectively resulted in me feeling a heightened sense of responsibility.
I had never really been involved in the organizing of such bigger events before, which meant that I did more research, looked at previous editions of the summer school, and discussed different things with Francesco and Tim Wittig (one of the winter school
coordinators in addition to Francesco and Pim). Then there was also the fact that it would have to be an online winter school, which had a number of implications that often seemed relatively small, but that often turned out to be much more complicated than they would have been for an offline school. Things I had to think of included the division of the program into different subjects, but also different kinds of activities (academic lectures, keynote speakers, practitioners telling about their experiences, panel discussions etc.), while making sure that students would not sit in front of their computer for eight hours a day as this is simply not feasible in an online environment. I also had to think of which specific speakers and teachers we could have for each of the different sessions, how I would contact them, what I would require from them before and after their session, how I could promote interactive discussion between them and the students, and a bunch of other things. Many of the more logistical things that I had included in a ‘to-do-list’ such as things related to the processing of
applications were eventually done by the other intern and Chiara, but they were still things that I had to include in the overall mental picture in my mind (and on paper) of all the things that needed to be done in order to eventually organize a successful winter school.
There were also other things that had to be taken care of, besides the things that I already mentioned in the previous paragraph. While I could distribute some of these things to other members of the group, there were also a lot of things that I had to micro-manage and mostly do myself. Promotion of the winter school on our social media was among these things and because I had managed the social media accounts before, this was also what I would be doing. Eventually, I ended up creating a kind of social media plan where I posted daily on most of our platforms for about three to four weeks, and a little bit less frequently before that. Different kinds of content that I thought of (with valuable input from the other group members) include biographies and photos of the teachers of the winter school, revealing other parts of the program, showing testimonials of how previous students experienced the summer school, posting about news articles and mentioning how similar examples may be included in our winter school and why, and a few more general posts
about the winter school, including a promotion video, that we also ended up sponsoring on some platforms. After the first post which I presented to the others before posting it as I always had done before, I just started posting things myself without first showing it to the other group members. It was simply much more efficient and they seemed to trust me with it because they seemed to be happy with the kind of posts that I made. Again, I did not find anything related to the social media very difficult. If anything, it just took quite a lot of time because you needed to find copyright pictures and think of other similar details such as hashtags, links, and the inclusion of practical information. I did find it quite enjoyable to receive notifications that someone had shared or liked one of the posts, so I guess I understand a little bit better now why social media are so addictive to a lot of people.
I also had to make sure that we had an online learning environment, similar to what Blackboard is for the University. We decided to use Google Classroom where students and teachers could interact and hand in assignments, and have the lectures in Google Meet, while there was also another platform that everyone could use for more informal interactions, and we even ended up making a separate Facebook group. A recurring trend among all of these platforms is that I had to try out everything to make sure that the students and
teachers would not run into any problems. In fact, many issues that eventually came up were things that I could have never predicted beforehand, but I managed to fix all of them together with other team members when needed and the students ended up having a very smooth experience, which was reflected in the evaluations that they gave for the winter school. There are still many specific issues that came up that the other members of ITG do not know about until this day. It was not necessary for them to know about it, while I could fix it myself, and so I did exactly that. While all of these more technical things took a lot of time to figure out, it was an amazing feeling to take care of everything that is going on behind the scenes and seeing that the students are not aware of any issues and have a very smooth
experience. This is something I experienced in the organizing of all of the different aspects of the winter school: that being this kind of puppet master behind the scenes is something that I really enjoy doing.
Staying in contact with all the different lecturers and teachers before, during and after the winter school can also be seen as being related to this. I had to make sure that they knew what they had to do for the actual sessions, that they shared materials with me that I could, in turn, share with the students, and a bunch of other things that often changed depending on the specific person at hand. I really liked this communication as it was often very casual, while there was often a clear mutual appreciation of what we were doing because many of the things we had to do were quite complicated for an online environment and we still managed to figure these things out. Hearing from these people who are each experts in their own specific fields that they really enjoyed the smooth cooperation with me and the fact that I was able to say the same thing to them, is something that I really regarded as a positive experience.
I also really liked the fact that when issues came up that I had to bring into the ITG group, that no one was ever negative, but that they always approached it with a positive attitude. Similar to the COST grant, this made me feel a sense of pride for myself and the team as a whole and that ‘we were in this together’. As a result, although the winter school was quite stressful at times, I never really experienced this in a negative sense. It did have a surprisingly big impact on me though as I was thinking about it almost all the time. Even when I woke up during the night or when I was dreaming, it always seemed to be on my mind. In fact, the night after the second day, when most of the things had gone right during the first two days and I knew it was mostly smooth sailing from that point on, I slept for more
than eleven hours. This almost never happens to me, so it indicated to me once more that everything had made quite a big impact on me. Again, this was almost entirely in a positive sense as I never felt any negative emotion during the entire winter school.
Something that I also became more aware of, which is also true for the internship in general, is that I felt as if my actions really had consequences in the ‘real world’. In
comparison, being a student now feels much more like working in some kind of vacuum due to the fact that only the teacher and possibly a few other people will read and know about your work. Organizing events such as the winter school, updating social media and the ITG website, and being responsible for certain processes within the attempts to acquire research grants is much different in this respect. On the one hand, this makes the work a bit more stressful because you can make mistakes, but on the other hand, it is a nice feeling to know that your work has an actual impact.
Conclusion
In the previous overview of my activities, I already discussed many of the things that I was thinking about while doing the internship, the few problems I faced, and some of the things that I enjoyed. In conclusion, I cannot really say whether my expectations were fulfilled or not because I did not really have any clear expectations to begin with. I think the internship mainly emphasized some of the things that I had already started to think about in previous years such as the importance of showing initiative, the importance of
communication, and how working in a team compares to doing something alone. One thing that I can confidently say is that I enjoyed the entire experience very much. More than I would have enjoyed, for example, most 10 ECTS university courses, but I guess this is because I was just so much more invested in it. I even felt a little bit sad that I would no longer be working together with the ITG team and they also echoed this sentiment a number of times, even now that the internship has officially ended.
Connection between ITG and my MA IR program
While most of the experience I have gained thus far in the studies that I have done at the University of Groningen and Leiden University were mostly academic-based, I felt that the internship gave me a clear idea of how this knowledge can be applied in practice. All my activities absolutely required me to have a certain academic level, but many of the practical skills I learned were mostly new to me. I feel like many of these things such as the
organizing of events and communicating with people inside and outside ITG is something that I have become much better at. Regarding the specific track that I am doing within the IR program, namely International Security, I feel like there is quite a bit of overlap between international security in illicit trade. At the same time, I could have probably done the internship just as well when I was doing any of the other IR tracks. In my experience, the (mostly academic) skills that I was able to apply during the internship were not necessarily things I specifically learned during the IR MA, but during all of my studies in general. Looking ahead
Perhaps the biggest downside of doing an internship at ITG for me is that there are not really any opportunities for me to keep working with ITG after the end of my internship. Well there are, but that would only apply to me if I planned on continuing my career at the University of Groningen by doing a PhD due to the fact that ITG is an academic research group within the university. There is of course the possibility that I will run into one of the group members in a professional context in which case we could try to help each other out.
However, the skills and knowledge that I have gained because of the internship will probably be the main things that would carry over towards my future career.
So how do I currently envision this future career? The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs is still high up on my list. More specifically, I would really like to work at an embassy in the MENA region or in The Hague itself where they have both departments that focus on specific countries and regions, and departments that are oriented more towards specific themes such as those related to security. I applied for a lot of internships at such
departments and I will also continue applying for jobs there in the upcoming period. Perhaps the internship will broaden my options a little bit in this aspect as it makes more sense now to also apply for positions at the Ministry that have things in common with illicit trade. However, the rejected applications that I talked about at the beginning of this report
increasingly made me consider other options. Especially NGOs that somehow combine the MENA region and issues related to security have been on my radar in recent months. While I did not yet apply for a job that specifically deals with illicit trade, I will definitely keep an eye out for it. Both because of the fact that my interest in the topic of illicit trade has further increased, but also because my familiarity with it will improve my prospects for such
positions. In fact, I am now planning on including the topic of illicit trade in the MA thesis that I have recently started to work on.
Tips for future (ITG) interns
I find it quite difficult to give specific advice for future (ITG) interns due to the fact that you can never fully predict what exactly is going to happen. I have already talked extensively with the intern that will largely take over from me, but considering the fact that the intern before me did things that were mostly different from what I ended up doing, I told the new intern that this would probably also apply to him. Perhaps I can therefore try to give some more general advice. To start off with, having a bit of flexibility in terms of your expectations is definitely something that positively contributed to my experience of the internship. You should not worry too much about not understanding everything at first because this is
completely normal. Of course, it is good to ask questions, but things will also become clearer over time. For me, things becoming more clear took most of the stress away from the
internship and I started to really enjoy the experience. To illustrate, the last two sentences of the document in which I explained things further to the next intern are as follows: Enjoy the process! Things might be a little bit stressful at times, but they do also end up being very rewarding.
