Tamino Paladini, an 11th grade student at Jade-Gymnasium, visited the Institute of Chemistry as part of his school internship from January 6th to January 24th, 2025. His internship was supervised by Dr. Lars Mohrhusen. In his report your can read what it was like for Tamino, what he had hoped for and whether the work and the visitstay at the Institute of Chemistry met his expectations:
Simple as that:
After a school internship, I first looked for companies in my area. As I was interested in both history and the natural sciences, I looked for companies with a focus in these areas in particular. After an unsuccessful search, parents of a friend directed my attention the university. I then just sent an e-mail to the Institute of Chemistry and Dr. Mohrhusen invited me to a video conference.
Exploring the invisible:
At school, my interests in chemistry vary, depending on the subjects topic and the teacher. What I particularly like about chemistry (and physics for that matter) is that you learn and try to understand that everything is made up of much smaller particles than we can imagine. It becomes fascinating when you start to be able to imagine it somehow, as I found out during my stay at the Institute of Chemistry. However, the difference between the school subject and the treatment of chemistry at university is huge. Whereas at school you are mainly told theoretical things, during my internship I mainly learned practical things.
Exploring the diversity of the subjects:
During my stay at the university, in addition to my internship in the field of technical chemistry in the working group around Prof. Al-Shamery, I was also able to gain insights into many other working groups. These included inorganic chemistry, medicine and physics. Of these, I enjoyed medicine the most, as the topic there was directly related to life (what is done there ends up with us), although inorganic chemistry was also quite interesting.
I saw a lot of things at the Institute of Chemistry, depending on which working group I was in, the labs were either dominated by glassware or vacuum machines. As I was in the field of physical and technical chemistry, I mainly worked on the vacuum machines and other equipment such as microscopes. While I helped with the vacuum machine in my first week (I mainly had to rebuild things) and was involved in measuring samples, I was allowed to work on my own in the third week. I was allowed to test different variants of practical experiments and evaluate them myself in order to further develop practical experiments for research internships. While the work on the vacuum machines was the most exciting, I enjoyed the last week the most as I felt the most productive.
Reinforce the enthusiasm and use it as motivation:
The internship was definitely a great experience. While I learned a lot about chemical relationships and became more and more interested in chemistry, I also learned a lot about being at a university and got to know the study options and careers there, which made studying more attractive to me personally. The internship confirmed my interest in chemistry. I now have an even greater desire to find out more and perhaps explore chemical relationships myself in the future.
Dr. Lars Mohrhusen adds these words: „Thank you, Tamino, for your curiosity and your high level of professionalism and work ethics! We are excited to see where your journey into science will take you and wish you every success in your future endeavors!”