Personal Development: Our goal with the internship abroad was to boost the personal development of our youth. Guiding Future Career Choices: Inspiring students in product knowledge as well as in commercial models to market products, guiding them in their future career choices. Social & Cultural: Allowing students to experience other cultures and broaden their perspective on the world. Professional Knowledge: Sharpening students' professional knowledge through influences from other countries and enhancing the professional knowledge within our own school. Whenever possible and in an ideal world, we aimed to let internationalization impact the overall education. Language Proficiency & Communication Skills: Naturally, especially in non-native language areas, we aimed to improve students' language proficiency, as well as that of our accompanying teachers. Guest Lecturers & Study Trips as a Means of Knowledge Transfer: With the internships abroad, we also wanted to build additional connections to organize study trips to the various internship locations and bring guest lecturers to the school. This way, those who didn't opt for an international internship could also absorb these influences and knowledge.
The school has been working with an Erasmus scholarship for several years, aimed at students who wish to do an internship abroad. The core objective of this project was to organize internships abroad as an opportunity for our youth to step out from under the church tower and broaden their view of the world. Many of our students come from families that do not have the means to travel and explore foreign countries, often due to financial constraints. Within this project, our objectives were twofold: On one hand, we aimed to provide all students who wish to do a foreign internship with this opportunity. On the other hand, there was also the objective to work on the quality development of genuine product knowledge, an area where our neighboring countries have a strong(er) reputation and where consumer demand is steadily increasing.