Living on my own has been an interesting experience so far. However, I managed to do the laundry (and still have clothes!) and eat on a regular basis – not too bad, huh? To be quite honest: laundry, cooking, shopping, and cleaning are things I always took for granted.

My roommates and I have been coping with a nasty cold this week as well. I managed to get over it fairly quickly, but I, unfortunately, can’t say the same about my other roommates. The weather here is mainly to blame. It was 25°C on Monday, 21°C on Tuesday and -3°C on Wednesday. The temperature fluctuations here are VERY odd; we even had some snow on Thursday but it, unfortunately, it melted pretty quickly.

A historical Super Bowl

My roommate Jake invited all of us over to his home in Maryland to watch the Super Bowl with his family. Interestingly enough, his grandmother lived in Germany for a long while, and it was nice to relate to some European things with an American.

The game and the company were awesome, but I didn’t understand anything about the game and don’t think I ever will. But that’s okay; we were there to witness the first overtime game in the history of Super Bowl!

Besides, the American countryside is pretty cool too!

Cooking my first meal ever

Before my adventure here the only things I could make were scrambled eggs and slightly undercooked chicken. Take-out isn’t that budget friendly, and sandwiches with Nutella become tiresome quite quickly. That’s why I decided to take the leap and attempt to cook something using the cookbook my uncle gave me. After conferring with my roommates for a bit, we agreed that macaroni and cheese would be an excellent first experiment (hence the title of this post).

And so, “experiment #1” was born. It was a great success, and everyone liked it. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck, but I am looking forward to making more food and becoming more ‘proficient.’ 🙂

Work

I enjoy my work. Even though it’s not something I want to be doing for the rest of my life, it pulls me out of my comfort zone. I’m not primarily working with infrastructure, but with business intelligence, and I feel that doing something entirely new and unrelated gives me some fascinating insights.

Brookings is also giving me a load of opportunities to help me shape my career path. We get informational sessions on how to plan your career ahead – they’re very open these possibilities, which is very nice and also helps me develop my career path.

For example, by working alongside data center engineers, I now know I don’t want to work as a data center engineer, something I could see myself do in the past. Instead, I learned that I want to focus on project management and try becoming an IT-consultant. Cool, right?

That aside: Brookings is a great place to develop skills, and they give a lot of room to help you develop those skills, something I don’t think many employers allow their employees to do.

I am happy with the internship site I chose. When onboarding with TWC, I had the choice to be interviewed by a few other companies as well. Ultimately, I could make a choice between a start-up and Brookings. The start-up allowed me to build up their security presence – cool right? It was a tough decision, but eventually, I chose Brookings instead because I feel that Brookings can give more guidance and will help me broaden my understanding of IT and business aspects in general, while not clinging onto the things I know and am comfortable doing.

PS: Happy birthday, mom!