My IAESTE

A couple of months ago I applied to the possibility of running to an internship made available by IASTE. Where IASTE is The International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience. As the name suggests, it is related with my current professional status since I am still finishing my master degree. The process starts with your interest being shown filling an application informing about your course, your language skills in four different languages I believe, and the possible places where you would like to work. In that time I was astonished with the amount of possibilities. I believe that almost all countries in the world were part of the list. And you even have to choose three options. So my decisions were Luxemburg, Germany and Denmark. Luxemburg was about a girl, Germany because I spend some nice days there and raised my interest and Denmark just for curiosity about the country. Anyway I must repeat that this application is just to inform IAESTE about your interest in participating in a possible internship and concerning my skills, other interested people skills and the total number of interested people, IAESTE Portugal will arrange some jobs here in Portugal as an exchange coin to other jobs in the other countries. Only later (now, in February) a complete list of all internships is made available and you apply again for a specific job competing against whoever is interested. The concept is fair and I confess my enthusiasm when a colleague managed, in the last year, to be selected to an internship in Cambridge. I thought to myself, Sweet! Or maybe, Awesome! And now, as it was presented the list to me, I almost immediately felt the need to write this post. Starting! Only three jobs were made available for electrical engineering students and the locations are absolutely... I don't know exactly the words because it was not totally bad but also because it was not really amazing... they were at least different from what I was expecting. Greece, Thailand and Macau contrast a bit from Luxemburg, Germany and Denmark. At least Greece is in Europe. I mean, Greece and Thailand definitely can seduce me due to all islands and old Greece history, and a totally different culture I would find in Thailand in the other side of the world. But with Macau I only can think about casinos and all that kind of environment. I guess I was right because the job there was something about maintenance of systems in a hotel/casino for first class environments. I can also write about this payment which was around 7 500 MOP. I don't even dare to convert it to Euros in here. I will let you, dear readers, do it. It is not that bad but it is not good So besides Macau I still have the other two opportunities. Next stop Thailand. The job is attractive because is related with electrical energy (my favourite area) and it is specifically to renovate old equipments they use in hydro power plants to have a more efficient operation. The negative side is related by the number of Baht I would receive. And by Baht I mean the currency in Thailand. So I would receive around 7 000 Baht. Does anyone have an idea how much that is? Life in Thailand must be really really really, but really cheap. Anyway concerning only about the job I think this is the most attractive from all three. The last but not the least I present you the Greek job with 160 € for week with and estimated life cost of 640 € for month. Do your math. Following... I must say that this is not the most particular interest in this job. The climax is reached in the job description where I find 'Industrial development of weapons and weapon systems'... What can I say? I know it is a job, probably not as any other because the development of weapons is not necessarily to achieve world peace with no costs... How can they purpose such a job... You can say, it's just a job, but I guess my conscience will always judge if I have made any bad contribution to the world through my professional life, and probably the development of weapons is really high in the top of such things...