A Tale of Two Time Zones

About the author: Lauren Schlick ’22 is an FSI The Europe Center Global Policy Intern with the Lisbon Council. Lauren is currently an Economics major at Stanford University.

Working for the Lisbon Council this summer has been an amazing opportunity to get involved in interesting and meaningful work for the European Union, and all from the comfort of my own living room (and bedroom, porch, and the occasional coffee shop). Even though I’ve been living on the west coast of the United States all summer, my mind has been in Europe. And I don’t mean this just in the sense that my work has focused on European issues. Along with the interesting research I was able to do on AI in the fight against climate change and the various metrics used to measure the success of digital governance, working for a think tank based in Brussels has also meant that all of my meetings and deadlines have been on Belgian time.

To be honest, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how doable it’s been to make an internship work with a 9-hour time difference. Going into this internship, I was excited but worried. I had managed to make a 3-hour time difference work at my last internship, but working from a time zone 9 hours behind my coworkers seemed a lot more intimidating. 8:00 am for me would be 5:00 pm for my supervisors. That’s the equivalent of an entire work day. But while this unique schedule has had both its ups and downs, I am happy to say that we were able to make it work really well.

At first, I’ll admit, the time zone difference created some hiccups in everyone’s work schedules. The Lisbon Council’s weekly meetings at 3:00 pm Brussels time meant that I had to be awake and functional before 6:00 am every Tuesday. Along with that, I wasn’t sure when I could or couldn’t reach out to people with questions, since most of my workday took place during the night for my coworkers.

Of course, early meetings aren’t the end of the world, but it was certainly a huge shift after waking up around 10:00 am most days during the school year. But even though this was only a small inconvenience, the people at the Lisbon Council were so considerate that they moved their weekly meetings to 5:00 pm Brussels time in order to make things easier for Sean (the other TEC intern) and me. My coworkers were also very willing to help me with anything I needed whenever they were awake, so I was able to reach out with questions whenever they came up and I knew that someone would get back to me whenever they were able to. It was this consistent kindness and consideration that made it easy to work around the time zone issue.

I was able to settle into a routine of starting work a bit before 8:00 am and finishing up around 5:00 pm. I would usually start my days with one or two meetings with my supervisors and coworkers to discuss various aspects of the projects I was working on. If I had questions throughout the day, I would message my coworkers on Slack, and they would either respond within a few minutes if they were still awake or they would respond when they woke up the next day. It worked surprisingly well, and I always felt supported in my work.

I’m extremely grateful for everyone’s flexibility at the Lisbon Council this summer, and I feel pretty confident in saying that this internship went as well as it possibly could have given the circumstances.