Max von Bröckel is nearing the end of a three-month internship with Hamburg Port Consulting, a world-leading consultant in the port and transport sector. He speaks of his experience and what he’s learnt from it.
Max von Bröckel’s workplace, with its cool, white interior is an oasis of quiet and calm. Smartly dressed people gather for meetings and consult computer screens in glass-walled offices, while outside towering cranes move purposefully in the midday sun and large trucks ferry colourful containers in and out of Hamburg’s Altenwerder container terminal.
Dressed in a sharp, navy blue suit, the 25-year-old KLU student is in the final stages of a three-month internship with Hamburg Port Consulting (HPC) as part of his Master in Global Logistics, and speaks warmly of his experience. HPC, he explains, is a subsidiary of Hamburg Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) - a logistics and transportation firm that operates three of the four container terminals in Hamburg’s port, and has a team of around 100 employees, who focus on consultancy for ports and transport sectors around the world.
A lot of this research is conducted through ministries in Costa Rica, such as the transport and foreign trade ministries, finding facts and information about infrastructure, roadways and waterways in the country.
Speaking Spanish and having first-hand experience of the region has undoubtedly helped him with his work. “I did a high school exchange in Brazil, then did community work in Ecuador for a year after high school and also studied for a semester in Mexico while I was doing my BA in Logistics Management in Bonn,” Max explains.
Exposure to different customs, cultures and approaches has been a feature of his internship. “The nice thing is that I didn’t work on just one project the whole time. I got insights into the macro-economics of different countries,” he says. And while getting information from a place like Switzerland “where there are standards you can rely on” is relatively easy, he says he’s also enjoyed the challenge of sourcing facts and documents from Bangladesh, for instance, which has less rigorous processes for storing and sharing information.
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