First contact

The only time I had heard of Wolfsburg before was in the sport pages of the newspaper, checking the results of the German football league (I'm a football freak). I didn't know where it was and what it was like.

Wolfsburg is in NiederSachsen, south of Hamburg and about 200km east of Berlin. Exactly 1000km from my home. I'd have to find a place to stay there. VW had sent me a list of people and offices to contact to rent a room. But I was very uncomfortable calling those people cause I had never really praticed my German outside of university. On top of that I was back in Lyon and dealing with my last semester in France. So I didn't put a lot of effort into sorting things out. But November was already here and it was getting rather urgent. My parents and I decided that the best thing was to go there. I called the guy from the translation dpt (the one that had sent me the test) and asked if it would possible to meet him. We set up a meeting during my holiday break.

So one November morning we left and drove all the way to North Germany with our car. I had booked an hotel room in Braunschweig, a city right next to Wolfsburg. We arrived late in the evening and the next day, we went to Wolfsburg. That was quite a shock. Wob is not a nice city when you first see it. Half of it is actually the VW factory.



One big pedestrian street with shops and a small mall. And then row of appartments building that all look the same. I don't even remember what we did in town that day but I recall feeling like crap. I really hated it. I tried to contact the people on the list to find a room, but that was a disaster. I was in that phone booth calling numbers after numbers and nothing was available and I really had trouble speaking German. On the morning of the second day, I had the appointment with my soon-to-be boss. It went well, he is a very quiet man. Showed me where my desk would be, introduced to the people I would work with. Said he'd help me find a room. The plant was very impressive, huge. At 10am, I was done. My father asked "What do we do now?". "We drive back home as fast as we can".
Overall, the trip had been rather useless. Ugly town, problems with the language, still no room. I was really demoralized about the whole thing. And to top it all, my parents noticed it and started worrying about me going there for a long time.

"You'll need a 7-month internship in Germany to graduate"

After high school, I studied foreign languages at university. English and German. Translation, business relations. It was a 4 year cursus which included 2 stays abroad. First trimester in Lyon and the rest of the year in England (as a student in Birmingham as far as I was concerned) then 2.5 years in Lyon and the final semester in Germany. An internship. No studies but working in a company instead.

I started sending applications in June 2000. I wrote down the names of all the German companies I could think of, looked for their adress on the web and sent them my resume. I sent 50 of them. They all replied during the summer. 48 replies were negative. It was kinda a hard time. Anytime an answer arrived in the mail, I was eagerly opening it only to find the "thanks for your interest in our company but unfortunately..." letter. In the middle of all this, a media company from Dusseldorf sent me a contract. But the pay was shit and it wasn't specified what I'd be doing. I turned it down. I was losing hope when the unexpected happened.

I got a letter from Volkswagen, the n°1 car manufacturer in Europe. My application had been forwarded to their translation department and I would hear from them shortly. A week later, the man in charge of the French translation sent me a text to translate. A test. And I passed it. He was satisfied with my work and told me he'd give a positive answer to the internship department. Late August I received a contract. I'd start working on the 7th of January and end on the 30th of July. 1000 Marks a month (roughly $500). So the first part of the process was done. I had an internship in a worlwide known company. In the translation department. I had no idea where I was going but I was damn relieved.