IAESTE Croatia has more news for our trainees! Every week we’ll publish an interview with some of our students, to bring you their experiences and encourage new trainees to come to Croatia.
For our first interview we’ve spoken to Agnieszka Zawadzka from Poland. This friendly young woman bravely agreed to be the first guinea pig in our project, for which we thank her 
Agnieszka has been in Zagreb for 7 weeks, working in the Institute for Photogrammetry. Although this is her last week here as a trainee, she has impressed her employers, so they offered her a job at the Institute.
“The best thing about my job, she says, is that my specialization is engineering in geodesy but here I work in photogrammetry. The great thing is that I got a chance to get more experience in photogrammetry, because I’m really interested in this area.
In my line of work I did tasks for several projects. Most of the time I check the orthophotomap if there are any mistakes, any transparent buildings or some smudgy areas and I edit and correct the mistakes. In this case I use OrtoVista software, which is new to me and needed to learn how to use it.
I also prepare the visualization for clients, if they any have special wishes. For example, if they want a photo taken from a plane of their building and the area around I do the visualizations so it looks better and they can use it.
One of my projects was working with EGM - EuroGlobalMap, editing the Institute’s database. “
This experience has been very useful to Agnieszka, both professionally and socially. She got to know a lot of new people, but more importantly, she acquired new expertise and put her previous knowledge to use. “When it comes to the experience that is connected to the job, I’m glad that I could use this special photogrammetric program OrtoVista, because I didn’t use it before. What's more, I’m glad I got more experience in Corel; I knew this software before but I didn’t have that much practice. I’m also glad that I could work in cartography and GIS division because this is what I’m also very interested in.
And, of course in general photogrammetry is interesting. It is not my specializations, so it’s great I could have the experience. I was doing my best and my boss offered me a job here.”
She has only the best things to say about her co-workers. “All the people are really friendly and very helpful. Even if they can’t speak English they try to communicate with me so we mix Polish and Croatian So there is no problem.
My mentor Ivan is the manager of the division. Although he is my boss he is very nice and he doesn’t build barriers between us, I can always talk to him. Mladen is my second boss, he is the manager of the photogrammetry group. They always explain if I don’t know something.”
Making friends is easy when you’re a trainee in IAESTE. A lot of free time gives you a chance to go exploring. In these past few weeks, Agnieszka and her friends traveled through Croatia, spending the weekends mostly in the coast. Traveling is always fun and interesting, but did you have trouble adjusting to life in Zagreb? “Ahm… no, no. Well, yeah, like using the trams here, because it’s different. But it’s a small thing and I got used to it very fast. The best thing I think are people – they are very open, very friendly, they put a lot of attention on their relationships so this is great. They are not in a hurry all the time; they work but it’s not a problem for them. So this is what I really like about Croatia.”
To wrap things up, would you recommend this experience to your friends? “Yes, of course, definitely! I already had some experience with internships. This is like double opportunity because you have some work experience and you get to know new people, another country and culture, so it’s definitely very useful.”
