Our high school trainee Fadi Tawik wrote a report about his two-week internship at the DAI office in Cairo: I am Fady Tawik, a 16 year old student at the DEO (German Evangelical High School) in Cairo. As part of the tenth grade curriculum every student has to take part in an internship in a company, factory or organization of his desire. This internship takes place from the 9th till the 20th of June and its goal is to get to know more about the job or the chosen company as well as the reality of working life. Since a school trip to Upper Egypt in autumn 2012, throughout which all tenth grades visited the current research areas of the German Archaeological Institute Cairo (DAIK) in Aswan, I wanted to know more about archaeology: How do archeologists work? What do they do with the things they find and which process takes place from excavating till publishing in books and magazines? Back in school I found an announcement that the DAIK is accepting trainees. I sent my CV to Ms. Sigl, who is supervisor of the ongoing transformation-partnership “School”-project – a cooperation between my school and the DAIK. As response, Ms. Sigl came to the school for an interview, in which I was briefed on what I would have in general and asked what I would expect from the internship. In the end I was accepted. Many may believe – as I did before my internship – that archeologists’ main job is only excavating but now I know it is only one part of their job. In the two weeks I stayed in the DAIK I learned that archaeology also involves scientific research and assessment, meaning researching in books and finding everything that links to what was found in the excavated site. During the two weeks I have done many different tasks. My main duties lay with the “School”-project. My assignments ranged from simple reading and correcting texts, scanning and copying maps and photos, searching in dictionaries for specific words as well as in the internet for photos and from whom to require their copyrights to designing page layout with Adobe InDesign, digitalizing pictures using Adobe Illustrator, writing Hieroglyphs on the computer using JSesh and even taking part in a photo-shoot for a new magazine of the institute. All the above mentioned computer programs I had never used before the internship but now have learned their basic usage, which surely might be very useful in future. Another important milestone in my internship was Sunday the 16th and Monday the 17th. On these days I took part in an archeology workshop for the class 2a of the DEO primary school, during which I supervised a group of pupils while doing a fake excavation and was the mentor for making pyramids out of paper. It was a truly exceptional experience which I really enjoyed. In conclusion I would say that I have learned much since I came here. I believe that this internship was truly a success and I can only say that this was a very nice and new experience for me. I recommend to everyone who is interested in archaeology and Egyptology to come here!
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 08:18:42 +0000