Alumni Spotlight: Tim Lammertink

I was travelling with my girlfriend all over South-East Asia for nine months when we decided we wanted to do some work instead of only travelling and laying on the beach. I knew the owners of Internship-Indonesia from the first time I went to Indonesia and we were having contact for a long time. When I told them about our plans, they suggested to come to Malang and work at a university. We did some further research on the project and university and got a really good feeling about the organisations. We contacted them and they had two nice positions at this university so we could come!

Different! On a "normal" day we used to get up around 7 and after breakfast, we went to the university which was a five-minute drive by motorbike. Sometimes we had to give a class to students, on other days you were preparing and developing the courses for the next days. I was in the technical engineering department where I had to give classes about several subjects, for example, the balanced scorecard. For every class, I developed some kind of game for the students to make it more interactive. The students were very nice and always interested to learn about my country.

Since we were interns we worked only in the morning so after lunch we were free. You could go to the shopping mall, swimming in the pool of the university or go to the gym. We rented our own motorbike so we had a lot of freedom to visit places in or around the city. Around Malang, there are nice places to visit like the Bromo volcano, Bali or Ijen. These were activities we used to do on the weekends together with a couple of other interns.

I learned so many things during my time in Indonesia. The culture is completely different from the Western one, which you have to deal with in your daily life. This experience also helps me in my daily life to better understand people and see differences between them. You learn to adapt yourself to different situations where not everything works as you want things to work. Also, I never taught before in my life, so it was a nice experience to be responsible for your own courses and use techniques you only witnessed when you were at the university yourself. I still can use this experience in presentations for my work.