Hello world!
Hi. My name is Anne Hilliger and I am the new intern at We Are Open Co-op. Not only am I new but also the first ever intern at WAO which means I’m also their guinea pig for a possible future intern program.
As a little taste of what makes me me here are some randomly collected facts about me: I am crazy for bike riding (nice gravel rides with coffee breaks and a good amount of icecream are just the best), the first half of this year I spend living and studying in Lapland in the same town where also Santa lives (Rovaniemi and yes I met him, twice), I live in a flat with 5 other adults and two incredibly cute kids (not mine though), I am definitely a cat person and if somebody would give me a basket full of kitties I would happily say yes.
I am studying cultural and media education at a small university in central/eastern Germany called Hochschule Merseburg. In the current semester it is time to do your mandatory internship and like my last name might tell, I know Laura Hilliger and have always been very interested in what she tells me about her work. Therefore I thought this internship might be a perfect opportunity to learn more about what WAO is doing, who her colleagues are and what it is like to work on projects with them.
Another incentive that made me want to work with WAO is that my curriculum at the university is rather focused on teaching kids and teenagers, mostly in face to face, school or kindergarten settings. This is also fun and interesting but in my world media education is even more than that. To have the opportunity to work with people who are specialized in teaching and learning in mostly online environments, who developed interesting and innovative tools and who know how to work with companies, charities or other collaborators, is going to teach me so many cool things! I am really looking forward to that.
After receiving a very warm welcome I am now in my fourth week already, the onboarding is in full speed and I am learning a lot about the projects, the processes and of course the philosophy of openness. I worked myself through the email courses they developed (please go and check them out if you haven’t, they are great!), and I got particularly caught up with the topic of working openly because this is something I never really did before and it is as exciting as it is challenging.
I am coming from an understanding of work that is very conservative and heteronormative due to the capitalistic structures I grew up in. Therefore I find it challenging to actually pursue the approach of openness. In theory I understand the principles, but what does it actually mean? You have to unlearn quite some patterns. I for example noticed that in order to ask questions not only to Laura (who is a confidant) but into the channel where everybody from the Co-op can read it, I have to jump over my own shadow a lot (a German expression that means to overcome yourself). I am still thinking in the pattern of “Am I allowed to do that?”, “Aren’t the others too important/busy to listen to what I have to say?”, “I am only the intern”. I am really looking forward to jumping over my own shadow for this more often and starting to integrate the philosophy of openness into my understanding of how work can also be like.
