I spent my internship at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences at the Krefeld South Campus. I was able to spend a day at the Mönchengladbach campus. Equalisation has an office on both campuses. Dr Sandra Laumen and Jacqueline Kiefer each gave me a short tour of the campuses. The first two days started for me at 9am and ended at 3pm. I was kindly allowed to move my working hours one hour earlier so that I was otherwise on site from around 8 am to 2 pm. I was given my own desk in the office and I was given WLAN access. I often looked over Jacqueline Kiefer's shoulder and she explained a lot about the university and equal opportunities to me. I was also given lots of great tasks to work on.
This was a very challenging but interesting task: As the Central Equal Opportunities Officer is required by law to be involved in appointment procedures, she wanted a checklist to simply tick off, listing the most important equality-related requirements for professorial appointments. In return, I received the university's regulations on appointment procedures and many other legal texts on appointment procedures. With these many laws, I first filtered out the aspects that affect the Equal Opportunities Officer. These are not just a few. I went through the laws several times and worked through the checklist several times. I then went through it again with Jaqueline Kiefer and put the finishing touches to it.
I was also able to take part in an online event on "Hate speech against female scientists". I was able to learn more about what kind of cases there have already been and how you should act if this happens to you and what you should advise and suggest as steps to take. At the end, the organiser split us into group rooms to discuss a case study with regard to various aspects.
On the day in Mönchengladbach, I was also able to listen to a counselling case and this made me realise how individual the cases can be in which people find themselves and how the Equal Opportunities Officer knows how to understand and deal with them.
During a break, Jacqueline Kiefer and I talked about our interests and hobbies. I told her that I like photography and the next day she created a task for me that matched my hobby. As she is always happy to use placeholder images for the website, I was able to take a few photos of Equality's promotional products. Equality has promotional products such as pencils, pens, stress balls, flower seeds, fans and much more. Two of my photos can now be found on the Equality website.
Dr Sandra Laumen and I sat down together once and she asked me a few questions about how best to reach young people and make university life more appealing, which social media platforms young people are currently using and what their wishes are.
The last day of the internship was also the so-called "Engineering Day". The university organised this event so that pupils could get a taste of the university's STEM departments. As equal opportunities had its own stand, I was allowed to design a quiz about the university, equal opportunities and STEM topics. I created 18 questions, wrote them down on a PowerPoint slide, printed them out as quiz cards, then cut them out with a cutting machine, laminated them and cut them out again. The end product looked good and was easy to use for the quiz. A question could then be selected with the wheel of fortune and, if the answer was correct, visitors to the Engineering Day were able to choose a promotional product from Equality. We used a button machine to make name badges for our team. I ran the quiz at the stand and people were able to find out more about gender equality, browse the STEM support programmes and take photos at a photobooth. I am very grateful for these varied tasks, they were exciting and gave me several different impressions of equality.
Fabiana Waletzke, March 2025
