Cheltenham Work experience at IT Schools Africa 2015

IN 2015 three students decided to go to the United Kingdom for their work placement. Our destination was Cheltenham, part of Gloucestershire, a city that is about two hours away from London City.

My name is Julian and I am one of the three participants of the work experience in Cheltenham 2015. I am currently in the Q1 and in Mrs. Becker´s advanced English course.

Our trip started at 5 o´clock in the morning at Düsseldorf airport and to be honest we all were tired as hell and I thought about going to bed instead of flying to London but all that negativity was gone when the plane arrived above London and we saw the sunrise and the lights of a City that seemed so surreal. It looked like the City of London was never asleep, a heart beating to the rhythm of work. We all were gazing out the window as we landed at London Heathrow were we met our contact person, Carol Stevens for the first time. She welcomed us and brought us to our bus which took us to the City of Oxford.

If someone reading this ever has the chance to visit Oxford I highly recommend doing so, the city and the market are just breathtaking beautiful and the college is awesome.

From Oxford we drove to Cheltenham, our final destination and met our hosts. I was sharing a room together with my friend Timo. Lukas, the third of us was at another host family about 10 minutes away from us, so we could meet each other in our spare time without any problems. We all were at the same “company”, an IT charity company called IT Schools Africa, short ITSA.

At ITSA we had to make soft,- and hardware checks on old and donated Computers that were later send to schools in Africa to improve schools and education in the partner countries. 45.000 computers were send to Africa since they started this big project.

I am really proud that I helped them at least a little bit and I would always do it again and I would love to meet my coworkers again. They were really friendly from day one to our last day and we three met some really interesting people in Cheltenham.

Overall I really would recommend going to the UK for the work placement because you can learn a lot about the way of living in Great Britain and the spoken English improves a lot by speaking mostly English for two weeks, proven by us three, all in an advanced English course now.

Julian Ley