Famke during her internship in New York!

Hi everyone!

My name is Famke van Duinen, I am 20 years old and I live in Bergen, the Netherlands. I study Leisure Management at Inholland in Diemen. I’m currently doing my internship with an experiential event and marketing agency in… NEW YORK! My host company organises events for other companies or brands. These events can be very different from each other, examples are: brand activations, launch events, media & press events, corporate retreats, private functions, charity & non-profit events and many more!

Half a year ago I started the process with Abroad Internships. I didn’t know I had to take care of so many things to actually go on an internship in the United States. Think about finding an internship, get a visa (huge activity!), accommodation, flight tickets, contracts, etc. My first tip would be: start on time!

I decided to already go to New York one week before my internship started as I had never been there before and wanted to get to know the city. This was a very good decision! During my first week I found my way around the city and visited many touristic hotspots together with other Dutch girls. Luckily I didn’t have a jetlag, we learned to get a normal routine quite fast!

New York is just like everyone is saying: “The city that never sleeps!”. Day and night there is so much to do, you won’t get bored here. From what I’ve seen in the past four weeks, the Top of the Rock was the most stunning. Up there, you have a view over the whole city and you really get the feeling that you are in New York. Apart from that, the nice thing about this city is that there are many small neighbourhoods, such as Brooklyn & Williamsburg. I think these hoods are the nicest. It’s less busy and you find the young and hip people. Besides that, you can also visit the beach. We visited Coney Island for example. And what I can really recommend is going to a Yankees game! That was one of the best experiences I’ve had until now!

Life in New York is always fun. I’m staying in The Webster Apartments, a residence only for women. I would recommend all girls to stay in The Webster, you meet nice girls very fast! Life in New York is so different from the Netherlands. Everything goes so fast and you really need to adapt quickly. But it is very challenging and I’ve learned a lot already in these 4 weeks.

People told me Americans would be rude and not friendly, but that turned out to be wrong. I have really nice colleagues and many people talk to you on the streets. It is clever to save money for New York because it definitely is not the cheapest city. Apart from this it’s also nice to recognize things from series and movies. I’m a big Gossip Girl fan myself and found most of the spots already!

The most impressive thing that I experienced was that we went to Ground Zero on 11 September. The first week we had also been here but it was a complete different feeling to go there on the day that it happened. 2 lights were set up to the sky and flowers and flags were set with the names of the people that didn’t survive. It was sad but very impressive to be part of this!

See you next time!!