Schaefer@daad.de Mon 12/13/2004 6:20 AM

Dear Humboldtians,

I am writing to you from the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service . The DAAD is a joint organization of the German Universities. The purpose of the DAAD is to promote relations between German universities and comparable institutions abroad, primarily through the exchange of students, academics and researchers.
A striking feature of the academic exchange with North America is the low number of students from the United States and Canada who study in Germany, while those countries are favorite destinations for German students. This imbalance can be recognized especially in the natural sciences. Apparently there is a lack of study abroad offers which are attractive to North American students. Therefore, the DAAD developed a new program – RISE (Research Internships in Science and engineering) - which will enable undergraduate students in biology, chemistry, physics, earth science and Engineering to visit Germany during the summer break and work together with a German Ph.D. student in the respective field. The internship will provide the students with the opportunity to gain a lot of practical and theoretical experiences in research, to experience German university life while visiting Germany and to improve their language skills. The program is supported by the German Botanical Society (DBG), the German Zoological Society (GZS), the German Chemical Society (GDCh), the German Physical Society (DPG), the GeoUnion – Alfred-Wegener-Stiftung and the German Association of Engineers (VDI). Detailed information about the program will be available soon on our website .
We hope that this program is also of interest to the students from your university and we would be grateful if you could inform your undergraduate students about this new opportunity. For your information I enclose as attachments the call for proposals and a little flyer which could be handed out to the students or used as a poster.
The next step will be to check the interest for the new program in Canada and the United States. Interested students should send an e-mail to knieps@daad.de. These students will be included in a distribution list and will be informed by end of January about the available internships. If they are interested in one of the offers they will then have to submit a short application form. The applications will be forwarded to the host laboratories which will select the successful candidates.

I hope that I could raise your interest in our new program and I would be very grateful if you could help us to circulate the information. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions.

Sincerely yours

Christian Schaefer