I’d like to pick up where I’ve finished in previous post about looking for a particular internship. What I was imagining as fairly simple task wasn’t as easy as I hoped. Majority of offered internships were about coding in PHP. I wouldn’t say I hate PHP, but I like compiled languages with strong typing much more.

So, my original plan was to find an internship for Java or C# developer in Ireland, Finland, UK, Sweden or Norway. I gave more priority to find interesting you in front of location; hence I had to extend the range of relevant countries for search.

During Christmas, just before deep search through AIESEC database, I’ve by chance found very interesting internship in Remedy Entertainment in Espoo, Finland. Even if I would lost already paid fee to AIESEC this could be a dreamy internship. Remedy Entertainment is world known game company with great games. I’ve already bought 4 of their games and probably will buy new upcoming one after planned release in 2014. Unfortunately they had no opened position for any interns. Well, I’ve diverted a bit from the topic, let’s go back for finding a suitable internship.

I’ve began looking for an internship in AIESEC database at the turn of the years. Due to be regular IT developer, I began with writing private application for organizing all found internships with my own comments. Don’t do this, it was a waste of time, fortunately I slightly modified another old app, so it took just hours. I was convinced, I’ll find hundreds suitable internships and I would not to be able to make head or tail of all of them using only AIESEC webpage. Big mistake!

After all, I’ve found only 10 really interesting positions, even if I count extended range of potential countries to nearly whole western and northern Europe. To mentioned above five countries, I’ve added Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands and even Germany and Austria.

During whole search process, I was getting many e-mails and several phone calls offering internships. Phone calls were always relevant and a bit shocking, as I’m not used to make phone call in English, but we always made somehow understood each other. Unfortunately, most of the e-mails could be considered as spam. Yes, they were offering internships, but regardless of my education and my preferences. These off topic e-mails mostly came from South America and Asia and I guess all or almost all e-mails from Europe, North America and Australia were relevant.

I was writing e-mails to all directions and hoping for positive responses. Sometimes we exchanged several e-mails and realized, it’s not suited for me and sometimes it has been better. I was a bit uncomfortable with web registration forms, for the reason that there was unknown response time from local AIESEC and sometimes I wasn’t sure, if was successfully delivered and probably mainly, it was unavailable in my e-mail history.

The first seriously looking internship was found in western Germany. I successfully passed interview and selection procedure, even we were discussing accommodation with people from AIESEC and everything looked great, until one phone call. There was a problem with my contract, due fact the internship is not mandatory for my study program. After a few weeks, I’ve retract my interest in this company. It was a pity, because job seemed to be interesting and everyone involved was nice and it was pleasant to interact with them.

My first and last interview was with a company in Basel, Switzerland. This company was probably the first really interesting one, but communication a bit hanged. Now, I’m really happy I kept waiting, it worth the time. This company is probably the best I’ve found. If I look apart from a bit longer overall time, there were no problems and everything went great. In the end, everything happened very fast. During one week, we’ve arranged all details of our contract and after a few days I was holding paper version of my new contract sent by mail.

I go to Switzerland!

This blog post is written before my arrival, so I’m looking forward to Basel, but I’m a bit scared and I don’t want to go at the same time. It’s new life experience and I believe I will like it. In the next blog post, you will find details about finding accommodation and other preparation before moving to Switzerland.