Provided that you study at a United States, Canadian, British or Irish university/college for more than 12 months at the application deadline, you are very welcome to apply. The application process is the same for U.S., Canadian, British or Irish citizens as for international students, so you do not need to submit any additional documents. However, you may need to obtain a visa for Germany and make sure that you will be allowed to re-enter the U.S., Canada, the UK or Ireland after the internship. For visa-related information, visit the website of the German Federal Foreign Office.

Attention German Citizenship holders: You are only eligible to apply if you can prove that you have been living outside of Germany for six years or more.

No. Applicants are required to have completed at least two years of an undergraduate degree program by the time of the internship.

No, you are not eligible to apply. You have to be enrolled at a college / university with a 4-years program.

No, unfortunately not. You need to retain undergraduate status throughout the duration of the internship. This is due to German labor law; we cannot obtain a work permit waiver for you if you are not an undergraduate. Thus, should you graduate in spring or summer 2025, you are not eligible for RISE Germany 2025, but for RISE Professional. All students who will graduate in winter 2025 or later are eligible to apply.

We encourage all recent graduates, Master’s and PhD students to apply for our RISE Professional program. Participants are matched with a German company, where they gain insight into the professional applications of science and engineering and develop their own practical skills. Just like RISE Germany, this program features a scholarship to cover living expenses.

No. Although you are eligible to apply for both programs, you must choose one. A parallel application for RISE Germany and RISE Professional is not possible.

Yes, you are. Explain your situation in the cover letter which you upload in your online application. Pre-med students, who have already gotten their first B.A. degree, are not eligible for RISE Germany.

German language ability is not required unless otherwise noted in the individual project descriptions. Get in touch with the internship provider if you want to discuss language requirements. Basic knowledge of German will prove helpful in everyday life, but the working language will be English.

No, this is not possible. We are not able to support personal or institutional contacts that already exist and are not open to the general public. RISE Germany is a program that offers every applicant the possibility to apply for any internship in the program.

You have to submit your application online at the RISE Germany internship database before the deadline.
(October 15 – November 30, 2024,  11:59 pm CET – Central European Time)

Do not restrict your search to a single field of study. Many projects treat aspects of, for instance, biology as well as chemistry. Because the internship providers have to choose a field of study when they submit their offers, you may miss some of them if you restrict your search to one particular field.

Yes. RISE offers also the possibility to do a virtual internship but  only for internships that mention explicitly this option. Please, read carefuly the internship description. Virtual internships got different scholarship rates.

You should carefully choose the projects you apply for and make sure that they are in line with your academic field of interest. Withdrawals cause considerable inconvenience for DAAD and the internship provider.

You are required to write one motivation letter for each project that you apply to. You should describe your motivation for applying for this research internship, and you should supplement your resume by explaining how your past experience has prepared you for the position. You may also add a few words about your plans for the future. As salutary address you can directly address the internship provider. We don’t have a word or page limits for the motivation letter.

You should include information about your education and work or volunteer experience, and some details about your interest or previous experience in the field. You might also mention involvement in political, cultural and social commitment. In addition, in order to ensure equal opportunities, you might also mention special life circumstances.

To learn more about how to write a CV, please ask your student advisor. Further information you can find also at http://jobsearch.about.com/cs/curriculumvitae/a/curriculumvitae.htm.

This is a document that you write/produce yourself and that should be not longer than one page. The “list of courses you will have completed by the time the internship begins” serves two purposes. First, since transcripts are ordered by semester rather than content, and because they often contain a large number of abbreviations, it is meant for the internship provider to better understand your academic history. And second, it gives you the chance to include all courses that are too recent to appear on the transcript.

The university transcript (Transcript of Records) lists the courses you have passed, with grades and credits obtained.
You can submit:

a) a digital transcript with university name/logo

or

b) a copy of a certified hard copy of your transcript (it does not matter if the transcript bears an “issued to student” stamp)

The form “certificate of enrolment” is provided by the German Federal Employment Agency that needs certain information to be able to decide on the approval of an internship. The certificate has to show stamp of the university/college and signature of an authorized person. The expected date of graduation is required in order to prove your ongoing student status to the German Employment Agency- so that they are assured that you will be continuing your academic studies in fall 2025 upon completion of your internship in Germany. Some universities do not complete third-party verification forms. In this case we also accept the university’s own official enrolment form as long as it shows a prospective/anticipated/expected graduation date. This document is available to download here or on the RISE Germany database or under Downloads.

Ask an academic from the university who can judge how well you would perform in an international research internship setting. For this purpose, someone who has taught a small class that you attended or supervised you in the laboratory is the best choice. Please ask your referee (must hold a PhD degree at least) to upload the letter of recommendation in the online database. The letter of reference must be submitted with the official letterhead of the respective university and the referee’s signature.  Please find below a guideline for your professor of what the letter of reference should contain:

• Since when and in what capacity have you known the applicant?
• The applicant is among the best students (in %): 5 %; 10 %; 20%; 30%; or no assessment possible
• How does the applicant stand out in academic and personal terms and how would you assess his/her potential?
• Of what significance is the aspired scholarship to the applicant’s academic and professional career?
• Additional information that could be of importance to the scholarship award decision?
• Degree of approval: Emphatic approval; Approval; Conditional Approval
  

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Your letter of reference must be submitted online by your professor. After you have logged in to the database and have saved your application for the first time you will find a field named “Letter of Reference – Please create a link for your professor.” Please insert you professor’s name and email address here. A web-link will be created which is assigned to your professor’s name and email address. Your professor will get an email with this link and will be able to submit the letter of reference online.
Deadline for submitting the letter of recommendation is December 15, 2024 (11:59 pm CET – Central European Time).

Once we receive your complete application, we will send you a confirmation via email. By the end of January, all internship providers submit a list of preference. They have the option to exclude undergraduates who they feel are unsuited, which rarely happens. We will then begin with the placement process and notify you of the outcome beginning of March. Note that we encourage the internship providers to contact applicants by phone or email in order to discuss the application.

We do our best to notify you by email if your application is incomplete. However, if we have not received everything online by November 30, 2024, your application cannot be considered.
It is the applicant’s responsibility to properly submit all requested application documents: working PDF documents, transcript, official certificate of enrollment and a reference letter including an official letterhead and the referee’s signature.

Yes. RISE Germany receives a large number of applications from North American / British / Irish undergraduates and from internship providers in Germany. Having a large pool of applications is one of the program’s strengths, but it requires that the placement process is carried out in a somewhat formalized way, as outlined below.

First of all, the internship providers send us their ranking of the applicants. This is the starting basis for all further decisions taken by DAAD. Afterwards, both the applying undergraduates and the project offers submitted by the internship providers are ranked as follows:

• Undergraduates are ranked in order of academic performance, as indicated by their grade point average
• Projects are ranked in order of demand, as indicated by the number of applications they have attracted.
  The two rankings are then used to match undergraduates and projects. Once a pair has been matched, it is removed from the process.
• The top ten projects are assigned one of the three applicants they have given highest priority (and who are still available at that time)
• The top ten students with the best academic performance are assigned one of the three projects they have applied for (and which are still available at that time)
• And so on – the placement process goes on in this alternating manner until all scholarships are awarded

Please note that this system is not absolute as we always try to make matches that please both undergraduates and internship providers. By designing the  placement process the way we do, we believe to achieve a high level of fairness and transparency. Undergraduate students with good grades, undergraduate students who provide applications convincing in other ways, internship providers who offer particularly attractive and interesting projects, and internship providers offering  projects that are exactly what at least one high-ranked student is looking for – they are all considered.

Please keep in mind that no individual feedback can be provided on your application – not by email nor by phone. It is the combination of your motivation letter, academic performance, letter of recommendation, practical experience and the internship providers’  ranking which serve as determinants of the placement.

Experience shows that internship providers tend to prefer applicants who have already completed their third year of study and have gained some practical experience so far. Nevertheless, we also welcome a considerable amount of students who have just finished their second year of study and might not have extensive work experience but stand out through excellent letters of recommendation and high academic grades. There is no single determinant for being awarded a RISE Germany scholarship in this highly competitive program but a combination of various factors.

You begin your internship between May 15 and July 15 (the meeting of all RISE scholarship holders in Heidelberg takes place at the beginning of  July), and you stay for a maximum period of three months (10 weeks minimum, 90 days maximum).
Unfortunately it is not possible to begin the internship before May 15.
You can agree with the internship provider on the exact duration of the internship once you are accepted. The dates which the internship provider have indicated on the internship offer description are to be understood as timeframes, which are to be readjusted on an individual basis.

European citizens do not need a VISA.
U.S. , Canadian and British citizens who stay for 90 days or less in Germany do not need a VISA either. Students who stay longer than 90 days have to apply for a VISA! Students without such citizenship are strongly advised to check with the German Federal Foreign Office or your embassy whether they require one (see www.auswaertiges-amt.de).

The monthly DAAD scholarship rate amounts to 992  Euros per month. If you stay more than 23 days in one calendar month, you receive the lump sum of 992 Euros. If you stay less than 23 days in one month, the scholarship is calculated on a daily basis (992/30*days). The scholarship is meant to cover living expenses such as housing and food. The award also includes health insurance as well as accident and personal liability insurance, issued directly through the DAAD insurance office. In addition, all scholarship holders are invited to the three-day RISE Germany meeting in Heidelberg. All participants of the RISE Germany meeting will receive an allowance of 160 Euros to travel to Heidelberg.

The scholarship also includes an international travel subsidy to cover the airfare to Germany and back.

Yes, you will need a European bank account (use of the IBAN system) to receive your monthly stipend and also the travel stipends from DAAD. We recommend to use  an online bank account for easy access and registration and you better do this as soon as you arrived in Germany.

Your supervisor will help you to find reasonably-priced housing for the duration of the internship, which can be anything from a room in a student dormitory to a shared apartment. You can certainly also use your own contacts to find suitable accommodation. Depending on where you’re planning on moving to, it’s not always easy to find a place to live. Especially, in big cities like Munich or Berlin the rental market becomes more and more competitive.

Beware of fake advertisers: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is! Rental scammers are looking for your money and data. Please check these offers carefully together with your internship provider and don’t pay any rents or rental deposits before.