Opening doors: The impact of the Daemmrich Fund on Junior Year in Munich students
In 2023, Arthur Daemmrich and JoAnna Loughlin honored their parents by establishing the “Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich Fund for JYM Student Research and Internships.” The first awards were administered that summer to five Junior Year in Munich (JYM) participants holding internships and one working on an independent research project.
Josué Chacón
Swarthmore College student and German and education major, Josué Chacón, held an internship at the Max-Josef-Stift, an all-girls Gymnasium and boarding school in the Munich quarter of Bogenhausen. The Gymnasium was founded in 1813 and has a focus on languages and music. Josué worked with six different teachers, visiting their English classes and observing and assisting students.
He was also able to teach some lessons himself. Josué says he gained from this experience “indispensable knowledge and a strengthened love for teaching and the German language.”
Janna Chong
Janna Chong came to JYM as a psychology and German double major from Wheaton College with an interest in working professionally with refugees. She interned in the summer of 2023 with the Diakonie München at the Lighthouse Welcome Center, a position that required her to gain the cultural experience of getting a background check done in Germany!
Opened in 2014, the Lighthouse serves as a contact point for newly arrived refugees in Munich, providing information, language support, housing, and free cups of tea and coffee to help ease often difficult transitions.
Linnea Noll
Another Wheaton student, Linnea Noll, complemented her history and German majors with an internship at the Deutsches Museum. There, she worked under the supervision of Dr. Martin Meiske in the “Forschungsinstitut für Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte.” During her time as an intern, Linnea was especially involved in two different projects, one on aerial photos from World War I and another on the everyday lives of “Bahnmeister” or railroad track masters between 1890 and 1940.
One of her tasks for the latter project involved searching for photographs in a professional journal for track masters that was printed in “Fractur” typeface. Another involved translating occasional songs written by track masters from German into English. These tasks helped Linnea to develop her attention to detail, her reading skills, and her research skills.
Kendra Pollick
Grand Valley State University student and chemistry and German double major, Kendra Pollick, held an internship at the Schützen Apotheke. Located near the main train station, the Schützen Apotheke traces its lineage back to Munich’s first pharmacy in 1398 and has been owned by the same family since 1909. In addition to supplying conventional, allopathic medicines, the pharmacy manufactures its own homeopathic products.
Kendra learned how to make some of the items that the pharmacy sells such as Chinese teas. She wrote of her internship, “This is a unique experience that I never would get to have in the USA. Many pharmacies in Germany do not have homeopathic sections either, so I got really lucky with this location. My experience at JYM has been wonderful and I got to live out my dream of studying and working in a foreign country—speaking a foreign language.”
Katherine Vaughn
Katherine Vaughn came to the Junior Year in Munich from Wayne State University where she was pursuing a double major in journalism and German. Having already held an internship at radio station WDET in Detroit, an internship at 30-year-old Radio Lora was the perfect fit for her. Most radio stations in Germany and in Munich are either state supported or private.
As a community-based station, Radio Lora is independent from public and religious institutions as well as from commercial interests. Over the course of her internship, Katherine produced her own feature-length radio broadcast in German, “Stop Cop City—wie die Bürgerrechts- die Umwelt- und die Polizeireformbewegung in Atlanta zusammenwachsen.” Kate considered this project to have been “a massive undertaking,” but she learned a great deal about radio as a medium in another culture.
Trevor Mrwoczynski
Trevor Mrwoczynski was the second Wayne State University student to receive a Daemmerich award in 2023. Pursuing majors in German and history, the Daemmerich award supported work on his history capstone project on German and U.S. perspectives on the Battle of the Bulge. Trevor writes that the project was “a culmination of my undergraduate career as a historian. Each year, I have expanded my knowledge of German history from 1871-1945, especially in the military history sector. This award has helped ease my financial burdens this semester, and I could not be happier to have been lucky enough to receive it.”
JYM encourages all of our participants to reflect regularly on their personal, academic, and professional goals and on how they want their time in Munich to help them achieve those goals. The opportunity to pursue an internship or independent study during the summer semester in Munich allows JYMers to take big steps towards their professional goals while further developing their language skills and intercultural competencies. We salute the first recipients of the Daemmerich award, and we remain grateful to the Daemmerich family for choosing to support our students with their generous and innovative gift.
