First Days at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)

I’ve been really happy so far with my placement at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, the institute I’m affiliated with during my stay in Germany. Known for short as the WZB, it’s one of 14 partners in Princeton’s Global Network on Inequality, an amazing program that offers grad students the opportunity to spend two months abroad collaborating with colleagues in the social sciences and/or conducting original research. The WZB is an ideal center for me not only because it’s in Berlin, but because so many researchers here work on the issue of social integration. (I’m officially linked to the Inequality and Social Integration research group.)

The WZB has graciously given me nice office space, which I’ll be sharing with a student from Harvard starting in a couple days, and so far everyone I’ve met has been really friendly. The place might look stuffy from an earlier picture I uploaded of the front entrance, but there’s actually a lot of funky architecture behind that main building and people are pretty laid back. As for location, it’s hard to beat: we’re really close to Potsdamer Platz and just a 15-minute bus ride from my apartment.

A bonus of this place being so large is that it draws a lot of visitors and outside speakers. I see that next week Charles Taylor (this one, not this one or this one) will be giving a talk on secularism and democracy, and a couple weeks from now an Iranian scholar is speaking on the possibility of Islamic democratic states.

All in all, the WZB is the cat’s pajamas.