BCB’s Internship Program: Gaining Experience While Considering its Meaning

Internships are an invaluable resource for students who wish to complement their academic achievements with practical experience. The Internship Program at Bard College Berlin allows students to get the best of both worlds: while scattered across different internship placements throughout Berlin, the students gather back together in a seminar where they examine their experiences in the workplace.

Each student in the program interns at a different organization, depending on their professional interests, with current placements ranging from work with the online magazine Teen World of Arts to Migrapreneur, a company that supports migrant entrepreneurs.

This personalized approach, along with the diversity of internships, makes BCB’s Internship Program really unique, says Prof. Dr. Agata Lisiak, who has led the Internship Seminar since the program’s inception.

Interested students submit their application materials to Roman Steindler, a BCB alumnus and now the Internship and Career Networking Officer, who helps workshop them. Steindler meets with the students one-on-one, going through the different internship openings, which they rank according to their interests. From there, Steindler submits the application on their behalf and manages proceeding communications with the organizations.

When Steindler participated in the program, he interned at a (now defunct) organization dealing with human rights violations of forcibly transcripted military personnel. “I had absolutely no background in international law, much less international human rights law,” says Steindler, “but I learned a lot and precisely, I think, because of my lack of experience.”

While the program gave him access to the professional world, the culmination of the experience for him was the moment when all of the readings he had done in the Internship Seminar converged with his internship experience: “Just to be able to see the theory in practice and understand the overarching structures and the way that we fit in them, was an extremely profound experience.”

The Internship Seminar equips students with texts, thinkers, and theories that help them reflect on their internships. By asking questions about the nature of work, like the relationship between love and labor, and offering different perspectives, from history, sociology of work, political science, and cultural studies, Lisiak hopes to give students fertile ground on which they can dig deeper into their experience.

Simone Kyle, a student in the program who is currently interning with CUTT PRESS and the Hopscotch Reading Room, describes the seminar as “activating a dynamic mode of learning, where experiential and theoretical perspectives coalesce and play off each other.” Kyle adds, “I appreciate the way texts like The Problem with Work by Kathi Weeks”—one of the texts on the syllabus that Lisiak highlights as being a student-favorite— “filter through each of my peer’s internship experiences, creating an immersive learning environment that critically approaches systems of work and profit.”

The seminar, Lisiak explains, seeks to stay grounded in issues that are “relevant to the current moment,” like texts reflecting on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on workplaces or readings on unpaid internships—a phenomenon which Steindler and Lisiak hope to make rarer and rarer in the Program.

Since all of the students pursue different internships, the seminar becomes a rich place of collaboration where they can examine the landscape of work across different sectors.

“Everyone has an opinion on work,” says Lisiak, but at BCB, students engage with the complexity behind those opinions. More than simply building résumés or converting internship hours into credits, the Internship Program encourages students to pursue their interests while reflecting deeply on them—and perhaps even reconsidering the world they thought they knew.

By Mishel Jovanovska ‘25

Post Date: 10-18-2024