My name is Nataliia Antoniuk. I’m a third-year student of the Insitute of Environmental Engineering of IFNTUOG. This summer I had an opportunity to go for a 8 weeks summer traineeship in Germany, namely at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg.
The second name of Lüneburg is a "City of White Gold." Everything in the city is salty, even a local online magazine is called “Salty”. While walking around the town I was enjoying the beauty of many old, brick buildings erected in the past by wealthy merchants. Since 1980, the salt is no longer mined in Lüneburg and a salt mine that had worked since the year of 956, was turned into a Salt Museum.
I really liked how warm and hospitable were people who met me in Germany, especially those with whom I worked at the university.
University Professor Dorothea Ehlers familiarized me with the specifics of working at the university laboratories. In these laboratories there is a lot of modern equipment that is available to students for conducting research in biology, biotechnology and ecology.
During traineeship I participated in group projects, helped in the development of research projects, such as an ecological project of half-opened animal corridor, collected and marked Carabus in a nature reserve Luneburger Heide, learned how to identify and record species of ground beetles in open areas or forest, studied insect taxa during laboratory work and did lots of other interesting things.
In the same nature reserve Luneburger Heide together with the group of landscape ecology I selected soil samples for the research. Participating in this project, I learned how to prepare soil samples for dispatch to the laboratory for further analysis.
Besides training, I was very pleased with my host family. They are very nice and interesting people, who used to have students coming to them from all over the world and they always try to do their best to make students’ stay in Germany as interesting as possible by organizing parties and providing different entertainment. We also talked a lot in English.
Together with IAESTE students I travelled a lot around Germany. It was very interesting to talk, spend time and share learning experience with the students of different nationalities and now I can tell that I have friends not only in Ukraine, but on different continents.
Student of the Institute of Environmental Engineering,
Nataliia Antoniuk
11.09.2014
Photo-report of the summer traineeship in Germany
