ZEIT GERMANY 2024/2025

G ERMANY

St ud y & Researc h

MAKE THE CASE

Convince

choose the future.

choos e B a d e n -

Wü r t t e m b e r g .

Are you looking for excellent research and study opportunities that willprepare you for thefuture?

Then,choose Baden-Württemberg. Here,you find Germany’s largest number of renowned universities with aclear future-oriented focus. Experiencewhy the state is at theforefront of academic excellence and instruction,and decide betweenmore than3,400 academic degree programs offered by theinstitutes of higher education.

EDITORIAL

Campus life in Germany is like student life in much of the free world: chat with friends after a lecture, study in the shade of a tree, enjoy a cheap lunch in the cafeteria. Student activism also has a long tradition – including passionate protests against social injustice, climate change, right-wing extremism, and war. This year, it has brought intense energy and occasional disruptions, from Lüneburg to Leipzig. But universities here are also well aware of their special obligation to remember German history. Perhaps nowhere else is the responsibility to combat anti-Semitism and other forms of racial hatred quite so high. And rightly so. Germany’s universities are committed to creating safe, inclusive spaces that make campus life deeply engaging for all.

The ZEIT Germany Team

Publisher Anna-Lena Scholz and editor-in-chief

Deborah Steinborn

ZEIT, a German weekly newspaper, covers politics, education, business and more.

ZEIT Germany’s print edition is available via the network of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Goethe-Institut, and the Federal Foreign Office, among others. The entire issue is available digitally at www.zeit.de/germany

IN THIS ISSUE

STEP AHEAD

We shot our cover in Leipzig’s Clara-Zetkin-Park with a student from abroad 4

BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Internationals discover the appeal and challenges of dual studies 12

SUBJECT MATTERS

From innovation to fave raves, some fun and useful facts for newcomers

14

ON THE MONEY

The cut-rate cost of studying, living, eating, and partying in Germany 16

JUMP OVER YOUR SHADOW!

What the oddest German idioms reveal about the country’s culture 24

THE WHOLE WORKS

Get up to speed on the newest student job options before your first semester

San Carlos to Berlin, Couva to Pfarrkirchen, Gdańsk to Erlangen: three women pursue academic passions

GOT

GREAT IDEA! Convince your parents you’ve just got to study in Germany

A pretty thorough to-do list for settling in, from banking to lodging and registration

From Beethoven to bees, the quirkiest and most complex scientific research projects

Academics from abroad try to balance babies and careers

A thriving college town in the east develops an action plan against the right wing

Students in Leipzig on politics, studies, life, and what Germany means to them

DEFINING VOCABULARY

From BAföG to WissZeitVG, key terms to help cut through university jargon

66 WHAT A WORD!

A challenging crossword puzzle for the bilingual brain

With companies sponsoring their studies and offering on-the-job training, more and more students are discovering the lure of dual studies

BETWEEN THEORY

BY CAMILLE WILLIAMS

Photos: Jamal Cazaré (this page), Amelie Niederbuchner (opposite page)

AND PRACTICE

Liam Thomson, 24, enjoys work-life balance in Jena (opposite page); Albina Akmuldasheva, 24, explores downtown Passau

Daniela Chaves, 20, walks through her hometown of Cartago

Daniela Chaves, a 20-year-old electrical engineering student, is passionate about aerospace and promoting women in STEM. She even started a podcast about oceans and space while enrolled at the University of Costa Rica.

Chaves is passionate about something else too: Germany. Ever since an exchange year in Dresden right after high school in 2022–23, she has been itching to return.

“Not only did I love the culture and make a lot of friends, I wanted to expand my horizons too,” says Chaves, who grew up in Cartago. “In Costa Rica, there’s still a big gap in gender equality represented in STEM careers.” She thought Germany would be more supportive of her, a woman entering the scientific professional fields. But, as a student from outside the European Union, she worried that it would be hard to afford tuition. She was also concerned about meeting the German language requirement.

Then, a friend from Dresden told her about the country’s strong tradition of Duales Studium, or dual study. This course of study offers practical work experience in companies while students earn an academic degree. Chaves made it through an arduous application process, and this fall she’ll start her first semester at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, or DHBW (which stands for Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg). She plans to earn a bachelor of science in informatics upon completion of the New Study Computer Science program.

Dual studies are gaining popularity among Germans and internationals alike. With about 138,000 people enrolled in these programs throughout Germany in 2022, according to the Center for Higher Education Development, more students than ever are opting for this niche. Though they make up just 4.7 percent of all students in Germany, according to the center, thousands more are applying each year. Universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) and universities of cooperative education (Duale Hochschulen) nationwide offer such programs.

With a new federal law to address the country’s labor shortages – the Skilled Immigration Act (Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz) – applications from abroad are slowly rising, too (see related story on p. 24). The Bundestag passed a reworked version of the law in 2023 with the aim of lowering barriers to skilled workers immigrating to Germany from countries outside the EU.

The concept of dual study isn’t yet well-known outside the country, but its attractive terms mean it probably will be very soon. Usually, a sponsoring company covers all or most tuition while also paying students a monthly stipend in exchange for a certain

“I wanted to expand my horizons,“ says Chaves

For any applicant, the process has a very special precondition: Host schools require you to find a job first

number of hours of on-the-job training. This makes it ideal for students who want or need to earn money – and acquire practical work experience – while they study toward a higher-education degree.

Yet this uniquely German study option poses unique challenges for international applicants. In addition to the usual obstacles to studying abroad – obtaining a visa and proving language skills – internationals need to fulfill specific academic qualifications. And for any applicant, the process also has another very special precondition: lining up a job. Most host schools require you to get a company to hire you before you enroll. Vacancies are advertised on career search sites as well as on university websites. For Chaves, finding the right corporate match was the hardest part. She first applied to DHBW’s German Informatics dual study program through SAP, which has its German headquarters in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, just south of Heidelberg. The multinational software giant initially rejected

her. It was only after SAP released an English version of its dual-study offering that things took a turn for the better.

“I had already given up,” Chaves says. “I had about 15 rejections from other jobs.” Because companies don’t provide reasons for application rejections in dual studies, she says she can’t be sure what the grounds were. But she suspects her B1-level German language skills were a factor. Many dual-study posts require at least B2.

The second time she applied to SAP, she landed the job. She gathered her documents for final approval by DHBW: academic records and a visa for vocational work. Now planning to arrive in Heidelberg in August 2024, ready to work, she’s been doing her oceans podcast, continuing her advocacy efforts for women in STEM, and brushing up her German.

Tim Goydke, president and managing director of the private Hamburg School of Business Administration, which specializes in dual-study programs, at-

“Bringing more international people into our programs and into the companies is extremely timely and important”

Tim Goydke

tributes many of the changes afoot in the educational landscape to Germany’s changing demographics. “There will be fewer young people in the future,” he says. “Bringing more international people into our programs and into the companies is extremely timely and important.” The school offers a mixture of courses in German and English. Though monthly tuition is 790 euros a month, university officials and students say that sponsoring companies cover all or most of that cost.

Dual studies began back in the baby-boomer era of the 1970s. Then, as now, companies worried about a shortage of skilled junior staff – but for very different reasons. Record numbers of German high school graduates were flocking to universities. The state of Baden-Württemberg was the first to launch vocational academies (Berufsakademien) that combined academic university content with practical working phases tailored to company needs.

The model was so successful that other states followed suit. Today, all 16 German states offer dual study programs. Companies like the concept for its retention rates. Even in today’s highly mobile job market, many graduates choose to stay with their sponsor companies and build their careers there.

Students have three main routes to pursuing dual study. They can get formal vocational training alongside coursework (training-integrated); intern for companies in phases that alternate with study phases (practice-integrated); or work full-time while engaging in either distance study or self-study (career-integrated).

DHBW, the direct descendent of the first dual study vocational schools founded fifty years ago, is Germany’s largest cooperative learning school. In addition to German-language programs in numerous locations, it offers English-language programs in Stuttgart (Bachelor of engineering degree in industrial engineering – international business management) and Lörach (bachelor’s in international business). It also now offers its first English-language virtual program: New Study Computer Science, housed officially at its Mosbach campus.

That program started in October 2023 with just 15 students, a majority of whom are women. According to Kay Berkling, a professor who heads the program, students hail from a variety of countries including Germany, Iran, Afghanistan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, and Pakistan. They live and work all around Germany.

The program is intensive: each semester consists of two 12-week quarters. There are 11 weeks of online study (for up to eight hours a day). An exam week follows. And then students engage in 12 weeks of

Photos: Jamal Cazaré (this page), Amelie

Niederbuchner

(opposite page)

Thomson at Jena‘s university library

Akmuldasheva likes to study on the balcony of her Passau flat

full-time work. The program takes about three years to complete.

Liam Thomson, 24, born in Berlin but raised mainly in Scotland, worked in renewables directly after high school but envisioned a career in software and gaming development. When he found Accenture’s dual study program in computer science through DHBW, it was his ticket to switching fields and living closer to his German relatives.

“The ability to be financially stable and not have any debt at the end of your studies is a massive relief,” Thomson says.

If there is a downside to this course of study, it’s the rigorous schedule. Thomson is finishing his second of six semesters in summer 2024. There are no semester breaks, and it can be difficult to jump back into work after three months focusing on coursework, he says. Despite those challenges, the student community, work-life balance, and financial benefits are worth it, Thomson says.

Although more state universities are introducing English-language programs to attract more internationals, dual study programs still present a challenge:

applicants from abroad must still compete with Germans for positions in companies.

Albina Akmuldasheva, 24, from the small southwestern Russian town of Elton, in Volgograd Oblast, planned to move to Germany as soon as she finished her bachelor’s in finance at St. Petersburg State University. Just 19 at the time, she made the decision after attending a month-long language school in Nuremberg.

“My first impression was that it was a beautiful country,” she says of her first stay. “I had a good feeling that it suits me.” So she began preparing her documents in October 2020. By January 2021 she was applying exclusively to dual study positions in companies.

The fact that she was a Russian national still based outside Ger-

many made her job search difficult, she says. “Every day I applied to companies,” she says, roughly 40 over a period of six months.

Finally, in June 2021, she found a position at p24 bank in partnership with Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT) in Bavaria. She would spend the first year with the company in Passau and the following autumn start courses at DIT for a bachelor’s in applied business psychology.

Visa issues nearly postponed her enrollment, but that September, at the last minute, the visa was approved. “I didn’t have time to say goodbye to my friends and my parents,” she says. She bought a oneway ticket to Passau the day before her departure.

Akmuldasheva didn’t know what to expect living in a small town like Passau, a city of about 52,000 people. She’d learned German, but nothing had prepared her for the Bavarian dialect, which virtually all of her colleagues, classmates, and instructors spoke.

“I didn’t expect to be the only [foreigner] in my class,” she says. “But it was good for me, because my German progressed faster than expected.” Four semesters into the program, she’s glad she took a

chance on dual study in Deggendorf. Besides enjoying the better work benefits compared to Russia, she even had a semester abroad, at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

Though many students are interested in coming to Germany, some companies and universities are put off by the complexities of smoothing the way for international students to enter dual-study programs.

“The biggest challenge is getting a visa,” says Milena Schmidt, cooperative learning coordinator at SAP. Originally from Bulgaria – and a former international student herself – she works overtime to support international candidates, reaching out to immigration authorities and embassies that are unfamiliar with the dual study model. “These contacts are often difficult to make,” she says. “Reaching them requires a lot of patience.”

Investing in dual study participants is also far more expensive than supporting interns or university students, Schmidt says. “The onboardings, individual trainings, university fees, equipment, and more cost many thousands of euros per student,” she says. But the benefits seem to outweigh the costs for all in-

volved. “You can train your future workforce the way you want and in the work areas where you have the biggest demand,” Schmidt says of companies. “You need more software developers and less consultants? You just train more dual students in these subjects.”

Not surprisingly, fields like tech and international business, where English tends to prevail, tend to be popular among internationals seeking English-language dual study progams. Yet such programs are rare; most companies still require high-level German.

One solution for international candidates is to take a gap year or semester to learn German at a language school, which requires economic resources. Universities may also ask foreign students to attend a Studienkolleg, or college

preparatory course. These year-long courses also tend to be held in German.

For Berkling, the computer science professor at DHBW, the more companies and universities support students financially and prioritize internationalizing these programs, the greater the potential for dual studies opportunities to expand – even beyond Germany. “You can imagine a company that has a subsidiary in Sofia, [Bulgaria,] and they want employees there to have the same benefit of dual study that employees have in Germany,” she says.

For both schools and companies, the challenge is getting the word out to the best-qualified people. Students like Chaves don’t always hear about such programs. If she hadn’t already known someone enrolled in a Duales Studium, she says, she wouldn’t have known how to seek out her own program.

“This could be a huge opportunity for someone in Costa Rica who may be looking to study abroad but doesn’t have the financial means to do so,” she says. “There are incredible women in Costa Rica, and just like me, they are full of dreams. I just want to bring this opportunity to more women.” livable and lovable: University of Siegen

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SUBJECT

Statistics New to Germany? Start your education with a crash course in life and studies ...

Population 84.6 MILLION:

71.9 million Germans

12.7 million foreign nationals

Out of Germany’s 2.8 MILLION students ...

... 16% are foreign

... 50% are women

... 39% study law, economics, and the social sciences

... 26% study engineering

... 11% study mathematics and the natural sciences

1 MILLION students are enrolled in STEM fields

Germany has the HIGHEST NUMBER of master’s degrees in STEM subjects in the EU

There are 2,332 scholarship holders in arts education

DIVERSITY STUDIES

2 MILLION people identify as LGBTQ+

21.2 MILLION Germans have roots in other countries

There are more than 400 religious communities

7.8 MILLION people live with a severe disability

Germany is growing in popularity among students from abroad. Low tuition costs, scholarships, and a relatively low cost of living are obvious draws. But a wide range of programs and more and more job opportunities after graduation are sparking further interest.

In fact, 16 percent of students in the current semester are foreign nationals.

If you’re a new arrival, kickstart your studies with a crash course on Germany. If you’re interested in an arts education, for example, you may bump into one of more than 2,000 arts scholarship holders. And if

BY BARBARA WOOLSEY

you itch to be an entrepreneur, you’re in the right place too. A whopping 30 startups in the country are unicorns, or young companies valued at one billion dollars or more. You’re sure to recognize some of them, and if you don’t yet, you should! Flix offers low-cost intercity busses throughout Europe. Flink is an on-demand delivery service drawing on hyper-local warehouses. There are more.

Hands-on learning is encouraged. So settle in to bingewatch “Türkisch für Anfänger,” or research modern dance at a club called Bootshaus. The choice of studies is all yours.

SARAH MAFFÉÏS

TOP TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES

TU Munich

RWTH Aachen

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

TU Berlin

University of Stuttgart

HISTORY OF INNOVATION

Germans invented:

the REFRIGERATOR 1876

QUANTUM THEORY 1900

the MP3 FORMAT 1987

the LILIUM JET 2015

the BIONTECH VACCINE 2020

BUSINESS AND STARTUPS

49% of all startups get funding from universities and research institutes

33% of all startups are in the green economy

30 startups are unicorns (valued at $1 billion or more)

They include FLIX, FLINK, TRADE REPUBLIC

MATTERS

... and impress your profs and peers along the way

Musicology

FAVE RAVES

AIRBEAT ONE (Neustadt-Glewe)

ROCK AM RING & ROCK IM PARK (Eifel & Nuremberg)

FUSION FESTIVAL (Lärz)

NATURE ONE (Kastellaun)

LOLLAPALOOZA BERLIN (Berlin)

BOOTSHAUS in Cologne is rated 5th-best club in the world

DANCING DATA FILM

BERGHAIN in Berlin ranks 13th

WATERGATE in Berlin ranks 34th

LEHMANN CLUB in Stuttgart ...

... and DISTILLERY in Leipzig are among the best-kept secrets for techno fans

Germany has won the EUROVISION SONG

CONTEST twice: in 1982 and 2010

Media Studies

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (2022)

METROPOLIS (1927)

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006)

DOWNFALL (2004)

GOOD BYE, LENIN! (2003)

DARK (2017–2020)

MAXTON HALL: THE WORLD BETWEEN US (2024)

THE EMPRESS (2022–)

UNORTHODOX (2020)

TÜRKISCH FÜR ANFÄNGER (2006–2008)

BERLIN, BERLIN (2002–2005)

Mobility

PLANES

Germany’s aerospace industry had €39 BILLION in turnover in 2022

430,000 commercial drones are currently in use around Germany

TRAINS

43,468 KM of rail track (the EU’s longest network)

Werner von Siemens invented the electric train in 1879

Germany’s first long-distance train – the “Flying Hamburger” (Berlin to Hamburg) –launched in 1846

In 1933 it connected both cities in under 2 hours

AUTOMOBILES

Germany’s autobahn system covers 13,192 KM

Germany’s shortest highway, the A831, is just 2.3 KM

The A7 is the world’s second-longest national highway, at 962.2 KM

A speed limit of 120 KM/HR on highways would save 4.5 million tons of CO₂

ON THE MONEY

On campus and off, the cost of living for students is lower in Germany than in many other parts of the world. The numbers speak for themselves

BY SAM GURWITT ILLUSTRATION SARAH MAFFÉÏS

Sources: AT+T, Bistro Syrien, Blau, Bupa, Club Mate Australia, CT Transit, DAK, Damaskus Restaurant by A&F, gesetzlichekrankenkassen.de, Hochschule Bielefeld, Jordanian Halal Food Truck, Just Falafs, Mamoun’s Falafel, Maza Pita, Moby Dick House of Kabob, MTA Maryland, Public Transport Victoria, Rewe, Singsaver, storebyweb.com, Studierendenwerk Bielefeld, Studierendenwerk Leipzig, Studierendenwerk München Oberbayern, Technical University of Munich, Techniker Krankenkasse, Universität Leipzig, University of Melbourne, VIP Damaskus, Vodafone, Wazzup Falafel, Whole Foods, Yale University, Yalla Habibi, ZEIT Calculations

Studying (in euros)

JUMP OVER YOUR SHADOW!

A ZEIT author unpacks some odd German idioms and explores what they say about the culture

BY JUDITH GILBERT

Photos: Lena Giovanazzi

Oh, the joy of learning languages! The insight it gives you into the mind of a people. There’s probably no better way to grasp a culture than to study how people put together words. And when it comes to language, German certainly reveals a lot. What a mouthful, with consonantladen syllables, verbs at the ends of sentences, and compoundwordsthatrunonforever. Perhaps most revealing of all are all those idioms, sayings, and

proverbs. While some of these will also be familiar to English speakers – der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm is a lot like “the early bird gets the worm” – other expressions are so unique that they get lost in translation, often to hilarious effect. Idioms, after all, are highly idiosyncratic.

I’m struck by the involvement of animals in many German sayings. I love cats, so I always cringe when I hear someone say Alles für die Katz! I for one don’t think doing something for my cat is to do something in vain. Fellow ailurophiles will also take exception to the idiom die Katze im Sack kaufen. No one wants to find a terrified cat in the bag when buying or accepting something blindly. That said, die Katze aus dem Sack lassen – letting the cat out of the bag – is

SCHLAFENDE HUNDE WECKEN

ES IST NICHT JEDEN TAG SONNTAG

DER APFEL FÄLLT NICHT WEIT VOM STAMM

not very wise, either. Better to leave that Pandora’s box – die Büchse der Pandora – firmly closed.

Let’s turn to the dogs. Schlafende Hunde wecken is never a good idea. English speakers also let sleeping dogs lie, but German speakers are instructed specifically not to wake them. (As with the aforementioned Katze im Sack, they hate unpredictable outcomes).

Other dogs are safer. Even though they aren’t referring to specific buried pets, Germans will tell you

da liegt der Hund begraben – that’s where the dog is buried – to stress that something is at the heart of the matter, or des Pudels Kern. From warning against the uncertainties of buying cats in bags and waking sleeping dogs, German speakers have other ways of stressing the importance

of staying practical. Lieber den Spatz in der Hand als die Taube auf dem Dach assures us that having a sparrow in one’s hand is better than the dove on the roof. Seine Schäfchen ins Trockene bringen advises moving one’s sheep to a dry shelter for the sake of financial security.

For real prosperity, however, Schwein haben also plays a role – to be lucky, you’ve got to have a pig. And surely, if you have your sparrow firmly in hand

EINE EXTRAWURST BEKOMMEN

and have brought your sheep to shelter, that’s zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen – two flies with one swatter. Now that may sound easier than killing two birds with one stone, but it still calls for lively celebration: Da steppt der Bär. That is, assuming your bear can tap dance.

Then of course, there is food. My favorite German idiom of all is Jetzt haben wir den Salat! To lament “now we’re having salad” means that things are really

going wrong. Tossed lettuce is apparently too much for the orderly German mind to handle. What did I say about idioms lending insight into the soul of a people?

A runner up for my second favorite food idiom is Das geht mir auf den Keks! When something is “getting on your cookie”

it’s getting on your nerves. Interestingly, something annoying can also get on your alarm clock (Wecker) or, more crudely, on your testicles (Sack).

If you’re disinterested in something, or feel that it is none of your business, it’s nicht dein Bier – not your beer. If you’ve been blind to something obvious, be sure to remove die Tomaten auf den Augen, the tomatoes from your eyes. And should you be fortunate enough to receive special treatment, go ahead

ZWEI FLIEGEN MIT EINER KLAPPE SCHLAGEN

Photos: Tom Huber / Connected

Archives

(this page),

Kurt Bauer, Renke Brandt,

Melina Mörsdorf (opposite page)

and enjoy your piece of Extrawurst. If patience is required, the German panacea is abwarten und Tee trinken – wait it out and drink some tea. But if you are drinking that tea without alle Tassen im Schrank – without all your cups in the cupboard – then you aren’t quite right in your head.

Even if you fear for your sanity, you shouldn’t be afraid to learn German. Jump over your shadow –spring über Deinen Schatten! If you give it all you’ve

got, even your last shirt – dein letztes Hemd – you can master its idiomatic phrases and all its complexities too.

Just remember: Es is nicht alle Tage Sonntag. Not every day is Sunday, after all. There will be some difficult times. And please, lass die Kirche im Dorf – leave the

church in the village. In other words, keep your bearings and don’t make things worse than they are. You will get it, you will master it, you will make the German language your own. And when you do, may a stone fall from your heart – Dir ein Stein vom Herzen fallen. So go with the flow and enjoy the ride, if not the salad.

– Judith Gilbert is editor-in-chief of ZEIT SPRACHEN’s monthly magazine Business Spotlight

DER FRÜHE VOGEL FÄNGT DEN WURM

NICHT ALLE TASSEN IM SCHRANK HABEN

JETZT HABEN WIR DEN SALAT

DER FRÜHE VOGEL

FÄNGT DEN WURM

“The early bird catches the worm” Get an early start; being proactive leads to success

ALLES FÜR DIE KATZ!

“Everything for the cat!” Something has been done in vain

DIE KATZE IM SACK KAUFEN

“Buying a cat in a bag” To buy or accept something blindly without looking it over first; “to buy a pig in a poke”

DIE KATZE AUS DEM SACK LASSEN

“To let the cat out of the bag” To reveal a secret

DIE BÜCHSE DER PANDORA ÖFFNEN

“To open Pandora’s Box” When excessive curiosity causes unforeseen problems

SCHLAFENDE HUNDE WECKEN

“To wake sleeping dogs” Raising a point that could cause problems – like the adage “let sleeping dogs lie”

DA LIEGT DER HUND BEGRABEN!

“That’s where the dog is buried!” That’s the heart of the matter

DES PUDELS KERN

“The poodle’s core”: the crux of it

LIEBER DEN SPATZ IN DER HAND ALS DIE TAUBE AUF DEM DACH

“Better the sparrow in your hand than the dove on the roof”: Keep what

WORD FOR WORD

A literal guide to German sayings (in order of appearance)

you have rather than risking it for something better; “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”

SEINE SCHÄFCHEN INS TROCKENE BRINGEN

“Bring one’s little sheep to a dry place” Secure your financial future

SCHWEIN HABEN

“To have pig”: To be lucky

ZWEI FLIEGEN MIT EINER KLAPPE SCHLAGEN

“To kill two flies with one swatter” To complete two tasks at once

DA STEPPT DER BÄR!

“That’s where the bear dances” A lively place where the action is

JETZT HABEN WIR DEN SALAT!

“Now we’ve got salad” We’re in trouble now; things have gone wrong

DAS GEHT MIR AUF DEN KEKS / DEN WECKER / DEN SACK!

“That gets on my cookie / my alarm clock / my testicles”: That really gets on my nerves

DIE NASE VOLL HABEN

“To have a full nose”: To be fed up, or exasperated, with something

DAS IST NICHT MEIN BIER

“That’s not my beer” That’s none of my business and doesn’t interest me

TOMATEN AUF DEN AUGEN HABEN

“To have tomatoes on one’s eyes” Being oblivious to something obvious

EXTRAWURST BEKOMMEN

“To get extra sausage” Getting special treatment

ABWARTEN UND TEE TRINKEN

“Wait and drink tea” Keep calm and carry on

NICHT ALLE TASSEN IM SCHRANK HABEN

“Not having all the cups in your cupboard” To be a little crazy or have a screw loose

ÜBER DEINEN SCHATTEN SPRINGEN

“To jump over your shadow” To overcome one’s fears or inhibitions

DEIN LETZTES HEMD GEBEN

“To give your last shirt” Giving the shirt off your back

ES IST NICHT ALLE TAGE SONNTAG

“Not every day is Sunday” Life isn’t always easy or enjoyable

DIE KIRCHE IM DORF LASSEN

“Leave the church in the village” Keep things in perspective, without exaggerating or blowing things out of proportion

DA FÄLLT MIR EIN STEIN VOM HERZEN

“A stone falls from my heart” To feel relieved

Photo: Lukasz Wierzbowski

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Germany’s Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz , or Immigration Act for Skilled Workers (FEG), is a mouthful. But the law is making the country more attractive to job seekers of all kinds – including university students from abroad.

The German government’s skilled worker strategy (Fachkräftestrategie) highlights the importance of attracting international students to the German labor market. Government officials hope that improving opportunities for international students to work prior, during, and after their studies will help Germany address labor shortages in many sectors.

And indeed, the law’s new measures are starting to draw even more students from beyond the country’s borders.

The law came into force on March 1, 2020. Even before stipulations affecting foreign students began to be phased in over the past year, university enrollment of international students had been rising steadily. In the 2022–23 academic year, it reached a record high of 367,578 – up 5 percent from the previous year.

But with so many changes being introduced so quickly, prospective students understandably have some questions about jobs and studying.

WHAT’S THE LAW ALL ABOUT?

The first phase of Germany’s new Skilled Immigration Act focused on attracting skilled talent to Germany. The latest phase, effective March 1, 2024, introduced some changes that will benefit

Nine ideas for part-time jobs

1.

STUDENT ASSISTANT

Work at a profile related to your field of study

10 to 17 euros (an hour)

TUTOR

If you excel at your field, guide other students and get paid to do so 12 to 15 euros 3.

COURIER

Deliver goods directly to customers’ doorsteps 9 to 12 euros 4.

WAITER

Working at cafes, bars, and restaurants is common among students 7 to 10 euros

students. It introduced new regulations regarding international students’ work rights, visas, and work permits.

The changes will widely impact students enrolled at German universities as well as those seeking placement in other study and preparatory programs, including language training. Overall, the goal of the new regulations is to allow students to gain work experience with German employers and achieve financial stability while studying.

WHAT EXACTLY HAS CHANGED?

The new visa for study applications (Visum zur Studienbewerbung ) permits non­EU nationals to visit Germany for up to nine months while preparing to apply to a university. During this time, applicants can learn about the country and complete language courses in either German or English.

Moreover, prospective students can now also finance their stay during these initial nine months by working up to 20 hours per week. (Formerly, they could enter the country for a nine­month stay but weren’t allowed to work.) Similar changes have also been made for people interested in doing an apprenticeship (Berufsausbildung) in Germany.

MAY I WORK IF I’M ALREADY ENROLLED?

The new regulations also make life easier for internationals already enrolled at German universities.

PR AC TISE GERMAN FORFREE

The government’s skilled worker

highlights just how important it’s become to attract

students to the labor market

Although most public universities in the country charge no or low tuition fees, many students still find they do need to support themselves with some type of part-time job – especially in more expensive cities like Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin.

To make this easier, the annual workday cap for international students has been increased from 120 full days (or 240 half days) to 140 full days (or 280 half days).

In other words, students can work on average 20 hours a week instead of the previous 10. During semester breaks, moreover, students are allowed to work full-time.

5.

OFFICE ASSISTANT

Answer phone calls and emails and attend to visitors

10 to 12 euros

6.

INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION ASSISTANT

Usually responsible for ensuring the smooth working of machinery and equipment

10 to 12 euros

MAY I WORK IN GERMANY AFTER I GRADUATE?

Even before the new law went into effect, those from abroad were allowed to stay in the country for up to 18 months to look for employment after earning German university degrees. And until they found a job related to their studies, they could take jobs in gastronomy or other sectors to support themselves. Once a graduate secured a job in Germany, they were also eligible to apply for permanent residence after two years of employment.

That all stays the same. But now, graduates who want to pursue a career in a field other than what they studied can apply for a German skilled

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worker visa ( Aufenthaltserlaubnis zur Ausübung einer qualifizierten Beschäftigung), also called an EU Blue Card.

This change is significant, as many people change their career goals after graduation. Internationals now have the flexibility to do so without risking their visa status.

HOW DO I FIND A STUDENT-FRIENDLY JOB WHILE AT UNIVERSITY?

Part-time jobs, also called minijobs in Germany, are most popular with university students. With earnings strictly limited to 538 euros a month, such jobs might require something in the ballpark of 10 hours a week. The good news: Whether the local movie theater or the supermarket down the street, such jobs are now more accessible than ever to students from abroad.

Another option, though one harder to come by, is to land a job within your university as a student assistant for a professor or in a department that interests you. These coveted jobs involve competing with Germans; but they’re terrific for your résumé.

7. RETAIL ASSISTANT

Assist customers in choosing items for themselves 9 to 10 euros

8. BABYSITTER

If you’re good with children and enjoy their company, be a sitter 9 to 12 euros

9.

FIELD INTERVIEWER

Conduct surveys, polls, and research for private companies

18 to 20 euros

Source: Yocket Study Abroad

Don’t worry. There are other options on campus, too. For example, you can apply to be a Werkstudent: that is, working up to 20 hours a week doing specific tasks within a particular university department. You’ll find plenty of these positions on your university’s online listings.

You can also try for a paid internship (Praktikum). These typically last from three to six months and require students to work full-time – something full-time students find tricky to schedule without taking a semester’s leave. But the work experience can be invaluable.

WHERE DO I BEGIN?

Research what companies in your field of study are located in the city where you’ll be based. This will give you a good idea of where to apply. Two first places to look are your university’s career services office and the German federal employment agency’s website (www.arbeitsagentur.de/en). By the way: Most part-time student jobs in Germany pay the current minimum wage. It was set at 12.41 euros an hour as of January 1, 2024. Happy hunting!

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Unser Projekt KOALAS bietet:

P Ein Studienstart-Stipendium

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EMILY WONG, 24, BERLIN

CHALLENGERS

From San Carlos, California, to Berlin

A mechanical engineer spends a year studying artificial intelligence and fish at Freie Universität Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship

BY JOSH AXELROD PHOTO MARIE HAEFNER

With the help of AI and robotics, Emily Wong wants to learn how electric fish communicate underwater. The California-born aspiring mechanical engineer also aims to gain greater insight into the broader mysteries of aquatic life. This year she traveled to the Landgraf Lab at Freie Universität Berlin (FU) on a ten-month Fulbright fellowship.

Everything in Wong’s world connects to her abiding love of nature. This was fostered early on during family camping trips among the Sierra redwoods of California’s Sequoia National Park. A dog, hamsters, snails, hermit crabs, and any other creatures she could convince her parents to allow as pets, populated her home when she was growing up.

“I was the kind of kid who would fish worms out of the puddles in the gutters, so I could bring them back to a flower bed,” she said.

The 24-year-old Fulbrighter is now a bona fide animal researcher, combining her computer science proficiency with her desire to increase humanity’s knowledge of – and capacity to care for – the planet’s other species. Wong spent a gap year after high school studying panda habitats in China. (There are just under 2,000 pandas left in the world.) More recently, while interning for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the summer of 2021, she helped scientists investigate climate change’s effects on the breeding of king penguins in Antarctica.

“If we know how animals are being affected by the environment, we could actually do something to change it,” Wong says. Now, after earning her bachelor’s from Stanford University in 2023 (where she majored in mechanical engineering), she’s helping a team of researchers at the FU’s Landgraf Lab. They’re studying swarm behavior in fish and bees.

Her focus is the mormyridae family of fish – nocturnal, bigbrained natives of African freshwaters that use a special electric organ to sense their environment and share information in pulses with other members of the species. Wong’s predecessors in the lab designed a robot fish that can mimic these pulses. Now she observes how live fish in the lab respond to the robot as it wags its mechanical fins and sends out electric signals from a pole on which it’s mounted. So far, she’s seen an array of reactions, including what looks like confusion, enchantment, and alarm.

AI-powered electrodes capture where the fish move in response to the electric pulses, and she analyzes the data, trying to use those miniscule datapoints to answer massive questions about ecology. The mormyidae use a form of communication that doesn’t take place on land. Wong says understanding “how they communicate could tell us more about collective behavior as a whole.” Indeed, scientists have long been fascinated with collective behavior, believing that the ways in which animals flock, swarm, and signal to each other have ramifications

for the animal world, for understanding human social behavior, and for designing new tech too.

It’s fitting that Wong is a polyglot, in both spoken and coding languages. Along with English, French, Mandarin, and her now B1-level German, Wong is also proficient in Python, C++, JavaScript, MATLAB, and HTML. She started her high school’s chapter of Girls Who Code, frustrated at being the only woman in her computer science class.

Her German skills were nil in September 2023. She caught up quickly, forced to translate variables in her code from German to English. Fulbright Germany provided funding to join a language course. Fulbright, a US government program, sends American students, scholars, teachers, and artists around the globe to pursue a range of short-term projects. The German Fulbright office awards up to 700 of the coveted grants annually. The program was the postwar brainchild of US Senator J. William Fulbright – the very senator who in the middle of the 20th century sponsored Wong’s grandfather’s emigration from Singapore to Arkansas to study medicine.

Two generations later, Wong heads back to California from Berlin in September 2024 to begin a doctoral program in applied ocean sciences at the University of California San Diego. Her next research project – for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – will leverage her skills in marine robotics to build robot crabs that will gauge the impacts of offshore wind turbines.

She hasn’t ruled out coming back to Germany. Wong has relished the devotion to the outdoors, hiking in the Spreewald, swimming in Berlin’s lakes, and running through the city’s many parks, she says. “It’s nice to get lost in the many green spaces here.”

From Couva to Pfarrkirchen

A Trinidadian explores the energy sector from a traditional Bavarian town –on one of Germany’s most international college campuses

BY MAX GRAEF LAKIN PHOTO AMELIE NIEDERBUCHNER

Sarah Berment always loved nature. Growing up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, her grandparents encouraged her interest in environmental sustainability from an early age.

“They both taught agriculture at public secondary schools across the island and would take me to visit farms when I was 3 or 4,” the 22-year-old recalls. “The backyard of their house in the town of Chaguanas is still full of fruit trees: plum, star fruit, coconut, banana, avocado, cherry, mango, pomerac, citrus, and pommecythere,” she recalls “The way that they live is so sustainable. They reuse and recycle almost everything. They’re such self-sufficient people.”

Home to lush forests, wetlands, and mountain ranges, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (or T&T, as she calls it) is exceptionally biodiverse. But as the largest producer of oil and gas in the Caribbean, it has been economically reliant on fossil fuel exports for decades. The discord between the island’s natural beauty and environmental impact of its primary industry nudged Berment toward an interest in renewable energy. She now studies energy systems engineering in Bavaria – at the European Campus Rottal-Inn (ECRI) in Pfarrkirchen, a branch of the Deggendorf Institute of Technology. The program has a strong emphasis on new technologies that could transform the global energy industry.

Berment’s parents live in the town of Couva on the western coast of the island, 30 kilometers south of the capital, Port of Spain, where they both work in IT and mathematics. They instilled in their daughter a love of math and science. Berment began planning her own next step into the world of engineering while working in the capital for the country’s Ministry of National Security. Her options at home seemed limited by the dominant industry. “If you want to work in engineering in Trinidad, most people end up in oil and gas, and I just wasn’t interested in that,” she says. Studying in North America was prohibitively expensive, so she looked to Europe.

Arriving in Pfarrkirchen in 2021, she found a quiet Bavarian town with a population of 13,000. It was the middle of a cold winter and a COVID lockdown. “The most obvious shock was the weather,” she says, but there were cultural adjustments to make too. Even now, she misses the cultural diversity of her homeland most.

“It has made me really appreciate the cultural melting-pot that is T&T,” she says. “Having access to parts of other cultures, like food, or celebrating other religious festivals. That’s how I grew up.” Trinidad’s cuisine is a dizzying mix of flavors and influences – from West African, Indian-South Asian, Chinese, and European to Amerindian, Creole, and Latin American – reflecting the island’s diversity.

But Berment was actually looking for that culture shock. “I just wanted to be somewhere completely new,” she says.

Pfarrkirchen’s ECRI eased the transition. One of Germany’s only exclusively English-speaking college campuses, it boasts a very high percentage of foreign students. Some of her peers were facing the same challenges of being far from home while adjusting to life in a small German town.

But on campus, Berment found a lively forum for different perspectives and life stories. “It’s been incredible to meet so many

people all engaging in real life political discussions,” she says. “It forced me to improve my understanding of what’s happening around the world, and ... to learn more about my own country.”

Without any big-city distractions, Berment has indulged her love for nature, cycling to the lakes in nearby Postmünster or Bad Birnbach, hiking through the forests surrounding Pfarrkirchen, and visiting local farms.

In the winter semester of 2023–24, Berment left Pfarrkirchen for an internship with Bosch in Stuttgart, which introduced her to new aspects of the energy sector. It changed the way she understands the industry and her potential future role in it, she says. As assistant to a PhD candidate researching thehydrogen economy, she immersed herself in policy research, read ing and analyzing national energy strategies from around the world to understand how renewable sources of energy are being incentivized.

“It really opened my eyes to the state of renewable energies and the state of climate change in the world right now,” she recalls. “When you’re studying engineering, you learn about all of these cool technologies and innovations. But you don’t always learn about the next step, which is implementing them.”

Since completing the internship, Berment has been thinking about taking her own academic career in the direction of policy. It gave her more solid ideas for her bachelor’s thesis next year. After that, she plans to stay in Germany to complete a master’s. She’s not yet sure in which field. It’s possible, however, that her interest in global energy policy could one day take her back to where it all began.

“As an oil and gas producing nation, there isn’t really any incentive for building up the renewable energy industry in Trinidad and Tobago,” she explains. “After spending some more time here, it would be great to go back to Trinidad and, taking what I’ve learned, work in policy to start developing those incentives.”

SARAH BERMENT, 22, PFARRKIRCHEN

From Gdańsk to Erlangen

Drawn to Germany by a prestigious award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a top researcher heads a cutting-edge group for cognitive linguistics in Bavaria

BY MAX GRAEF LAKIN PHOTO SEBASTIAN LOCK

EWA DĄBROWSKA, 61, ERLANGEN

Ewa Dąbrowska still relishes the series of coincidences that sparked her interest in cognitive linguistics.

Dąbrowska holds the professorship for cognitive linguistics at FAU Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (University of Erlangen–

Nuremberg). The chair was established in 2018 in conjunction with the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship she was awarded by the foundation. That coveted distinction – part of a larger project

to attract leading researchers to universities in Germany – goes to just a few scholars a year.

Dąbrowska mostly grew up in communist Poland, in Gdańsk, but she also lived with her family in the United States for four years. As a schoolgirl in Baltimore, where her father worked for Polish Ocean Lines, she not only learned English but also “fell in love” with Spanish. Those early experiences ignited a passion for language that shaped the rest of her life.

For a Polish youngster, the experience offered a rare chance to see the West up close. Living in the US toward the end of the Cold War from 1975 to 1979, she was struck by both America’s wealth and its poverty. She was also exposed to the bizarre and sometimes hostile ideas her American peers had about life behind the Iron Curtain.

Returning to Poland at 16, Dąbrowska initially planned to study math or computer science at university. But when a friend suggested she enter an academic English language contest, Dąbrowska just happened to win first prize. That inspired her to enroll in English linguistics at the University of Gdańsk, where she began her studies in 1982.

The decisive coincidence came while she was an undergraduate. Glancing at a class schedule one day, she noticed a lecture for something called cognitive linguistics. It was slated to take place right after her class in second-year syntax in the same hall. Intrigued by a topic she had never heard of, she decided to stick around and listen.

That lecture turned out to be a critique of Noam Chomsky’s theory of “universal grammar.” According to the concept, humans – regardless of what language they speak – are born with a genetic blueprint for grammar in their brains. This is what enables them to learn the language of their community. This allows them to acquire language as children. It was the early 1980s, and “UG” was dominant in many linguistics departments at the time. As Dąbrowska delved deeper into this school of thought, however, she found herself increasingly exasperated by the lack of supporting evidence.

“Traditional linguistics was dominated by these ‘great minds’ – usually men – having clever ideas, writing them down and developing theories,” she says. “But it wasn’t empirical. There was a lot of theorizing, but very little hypothesis testing.”

Dąbrowska was meanwhile also seeing her country transformed by the Solidarity movement but also by the period of martial law of the early 1980s. The end of 1989 brought the exciting, sometimes painful introduction of the free market. “When the market economy was introduced, everybody was enthusiastic,” she remembers. “But then came this bitter disappointment. Now we have goods in the shops, but we haven’t got the money to buy them. Isn’t that unfair?”

Frustrated by the relative isolation of Polish academia, Dąbrowska headed to the United Kingdom in 1993 to continue her studies. She earned her MPhil in Scotland the next year, completed her doctorate back in Gdańsk in 1995, and spent the next two decades at various British universities. While teaching at Northumbria University in 2014, she was invited to a conference on Chomskyan linguistics. She delivered a highly critical lecture: “What Exactly is Universal Grammar, and Has Anyone Seen It?” It caused an uproar, even before publication.

While Chomskyites continue to try to link language to universal grammar, Dąbrowska is firmly in the “constructivist” camp. Put very simply, the “construction grammar” school holds that the building blocks of human language are learned pairings of linguistic forms and meanings. She has devoted her career to explaining “individual differences.” Her own groundbreaking idea is that different people can have significantly different linguistic knowledge, abilities, and ways of using language.

For much of Dąbrowska’s career, traditional linguists have viewed her with suspicion. She recalls having one paper rejected by a linguistics journal on bizarre grounds. “The reviewer told me: ‘I’m not an experimentalist, so I can’t comment on the method, but there must be something wrong, because obviously the conclusion is wrong.’” Another peer reviewer, a psychologist, had the opposite take: the experiment was methodologically sound, but the idea of individual differences was so obviously true that it couldn’t be considered groundbreaking. Such was the gulf between disciplines at the time.

Dąbrowska’s work still sits on an interdisciplinary border. Her permanent Humboldt professorship at

FAU has at last enabled Dąbrowska to devote substantial resources to her research – especially by supporting a broad cohort of her colleagues working in construction grammar.

In Erlangen, she heads the chair for language and cognition within the department of English and American studies. She also spearheads Dimensions of Constructional Space, a research training group.

“All the work that I did before I came to Germany was done on a shoestring,” she explains. “The amazing thing about the Humboldt [Professorship] awards is that we are given complete freedom to research.”

Working with a diverse team of senior linguists and students from across FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg’s various departments, Dąbrowska and her colleagues are now running a number of studies to examine how people learn languages. They often work with children.

Today, Dąbrowska is optimistic that the group’s lab work will yield vital new information, changing how researchers and doctors find therapies for language impairment and even how people approach teaching languages.

With their pioneering work in construction grammar, linguists like Dąbrowska have transformed the field. And she has high hopes for the next generation of scholars. “There is so much more work on individual differences out there now than when I started,” she says. “Linguists are talking more to psychologists, and vice versa. There’s cross-fertilization. Instead of reinventing the wheel all the time, let’s work together on a plausible model and refine our existing theories.”

I ’ VE GOT A

Thinking of studying in Germany? You may have to sell your parents on it.

TUITION IS PRACTICALLY FREE!

I won’t have to pay high fees. And guess what? Thousands of scholarships and grants are available, even to non-Germans

I ’ LL ACQUIRE ALL THOSE GERMAN VIRTUES!

Courtesy, punctuality, diligence, tidiness! Germans pride themselves on these traits. Wouldn’t you love if I acquired some?

THEY ’ LL HAVE ME COVERED! Germany has a comprehensive healthcare system. (Yeah, even I know that!) So I’ll be well taken care of. No need to worry!

I CAN TRAVEL THE WORLD! (WELL, EUROPE ... ) I’ll get to know the whole continent. From Venice to Paris in no time! We can even go to the island of Sylt when you visit

BY DEBORAH STEINBORN ILLUSTRATION SOFIA HYDMAN

GREAT IDEA!

On the list of pros and cons, though, the pros may well win. So go ahead and make your pitch!

I ’ LL LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE!

Languages are the gateway to the world! Didn’t you say that, Mom? Studying in Germany will be an immersive experience

IF I STAY, I ’ LL GET A GREAT JOB!

Germany boasts a robust economy with ample job opportunities, especially in sectors relevant to my field of study. Great prospects!

I ’ LL IMPRESS YOUR SMARTEST FRIENDS! It’s the Land of Poets and Thinkers. Goethe! Schiller! It’s home to top-ranked technical universities too. I’m gonna learn so much!

AND I ’ LL FINALLY BE OUT OF YOUR HAIR! Studying abroad fosters independence, adaptability, resilience! And you, dear Mom and Dad, will have time for yourselves

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Congratulations on deciding to study in Germany! Cultural immersion and self-discovery await –but first, focus on what Abraham Maslow says is most important in the heirarchy of needs: shelter. The cheapest bet is a student dormitory (Studentenwohnheim), shared housing for students. Most university towns have several, and they’re run by the local non-profit student services office (Studierendenwerk). Rents vary considerably depending on location, size, and amenities. But in Germany, a student dorm room costs on average 267 euros per month. Affordability inevitably means popularity, however, so register for a place as soon as possible. More than 40 percent of international students choose this option, and it’s generally first-come, first-served.

If you don’t want to move into a dormitory (or don’t manage to secure a spot), you can try sharing a flat with other students in a WG (Wohngemeinschaft). You’ll have to take turns with the washing machine, the bathroom, and the kitchen, but you’ll also make friends fast. Post your own want ad on an online platform like WG-Gesucht, scour university bulletin boards, or ask around. Are you willing to pay a higher price for privacy and comfort? Then it’s worth the extra work to hunt for your own place, but be ready to invest the time and paperwork. Check out SabbaticalHomes, a platform on which academics, writers, and artists typically sublet their furnished flats temporarily. WG-Gesucht and Kleinanzeigen also list shortterm sublets. The latter – a platform for local want ads formerly associated with eBay – is also a go-to source for inexpensive secondhand furniture. You’ll find everything from beds to balcony

ON THE MOVE

Want to come to Germany to study or work?

You’ll need to clear a few hurdles first. Some tips for heading in the right direction in your first few weeks

BY JOSH AXELROD

furniture. And you can sell your stuff over the same platform at the end of your stay.

Landlords, by the way, typically require a security deposit (Kaution) equivalent to three times your base rent (the legal maximum!) to be returned upon termination of the lease, assuming you leave the place in tip-top shape. Protect yourself from scams by waiting

moving to a big city like Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich, don’t budget just a few days to find your own flat; it may take weeks or even months.

SETTLE THE RED TAPE

If you’ve ever read the works of Franz Kafka, you’re well aware that bureaucracy holds a special place in the lives of Germanspeakers. By all means book an appointment with your local registration authority (Meldeamt) before you move. Securing a certificate of residence, the so-called Meldebestätigung, is a prerequisite to opening many other doors. You can – and should – book your appointment online, but you will have to attend it in person.

Be sure to bring along your passport, registration form ( Anmeldeformular) filled out and signed, and your landlord’s statement (Wohnungsgeberbescheinigung), also completed and signed. German law stipulates that you should make this appointment within two weeks of moving to a new city. But because local authorities tend to book months in advance, it often takes longer to clear this hurdle. If you don’t meet the deadline, it’s probably not a big deal, but be sure you can prove that you tried to get an appointment within those first two weeks.

BANK ON IT

to pay the Kaution until you’ve examined the flat in person and by meticulously documenting the condition of the apartment when you move in.

And beware: Germany is facing its worst housing shortage in two decades. The German Property Federation (ZIA) expects a shortage of around 750,000 flats nationwide by 2025. So if you’re

For many foreign students requiring a student visa, a key stepping stone is a blocked bank account (Sperrkonto). This is a special account in Germany into which you deposit all the funds you’ll need to cover your living expenses for one year, thereby proving to authorities that you can support yourself financially. (It also res-

Not sure how long you’ll stay? Opt for second-hand furniture!

tricts the amount you’re able to withdraw each month.)

As of 2024, the German government requires a mandatory Sperrkonto deposit of a hefty 11,208 euros, which amounts to 934 euros a month. If you need to apply for a student visa, the government advises opening a blocked account “as soon as you get your university admission letter.” Not every student needs one, however. There are exemptions for nationals of certain countries, for one. So do the research to find out whether you qualify.

If you want something to supplement the Sperrkonto, a range of public and private German banks offer student bank accounts. These include Sparkasse, Postbank, and Commerzbank. Their networks have ATMs on almost every street corner in Germany, where you can withdraw money free of charge (though you should keep an eye out for hidden fees). You’ll need your passport and your Meldebestätigung to get started at your local branch. Various virtual banks offer customer service in multiple lang uages and have fewer requirements. Try Bunq, N26, Revolut, or Wise, which accept passports as a form of ID, don’t require a Meldebestätigung, and offer free ATM withdrawals. You may have to pay more for features like a German IBAN or more ATM access.

Regardless of what bank account you opt for, keep in mind that a lot of smaller German businesses still operate on a cashonly basis. Be sure to have euros on hand.

INSURE YOUR HEALTH

Everyone in Germany needs health insurance (Krankenversicherung ), and international

Be patient! It could take weeks or even months to get an appointment at your local housing authority for that all-important local registration

students are no exception. Tackle this issue early on, since proof of German health insurance is a prerequisite for getting both your student visa and your residence permit. If you’re not from the European Economic Area or a handful of other countries (and therefore can’t use your home insurance policy), sign up for public or private Krankenversicherung.

Students under 30 doing a degree are eligible to register for public health insurance at an attractive discount. In most cases, public health insurance suffices to cover most medication and hospital stays, though there’s often a substantial deductible for dental visits. Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), HEK, and AOK are all respected public health insu-

rers. Indeed, about 90 percent of Germans have public health insurance. If you opt instead for a private plan, keep in mind that you’ll have to opt out of the public system – a step that’s very hard to reverse.

Private health insurance may be more attractive if you’re 30 or older when you start your studies, since the public insurance rate could be quite high.

Whatever your age, if you’re enrolled in a preparatory course prior to starting your degree (for example a German language course or a Studienkolleg ), you are not eligible for public health insurance. (If you’re under 30, you can register for public health insurance once you’ve been accepted into a degree program.)

Other forms of insurance may not be required, but they’ll help give you that uniquely German sense of security. It’s a good idea to line up some personal liability insurance (Haftpflichtversicherung) – just in case you step on a classmate’s smartphone or lose your keys and need to call a locksmith. That usually costs about five euros a month.

Since Germany is the land of cyclists, why not insure your trusty two-wheeled steed while you’re at it? Feather, a digital-only, English-language insurance provider, offers basic bicycle insurance starting from 2.90 euros per month, which covers bike theft. For a few extra euros a month, you can cover repairs, too, so there’s no need to wrestle with your inner tube every time you get a flat.

MAKE IT OFFICIAL

You’re on the home stretch. But if you’re from outside the European Union, you still need a German residence permit ( Aufenthaltstitel ) to attend your university or

Photo: Marc Krause / Connected Archives

course. Apply for this at the local foreigners’ registration office (Ausländerbehörde). Aufenthaltstitel types and requirements will vary depending on your home country and the type of course or institution you’re enrolling in. Inform yourself ahead of time.

Depending on which city you’re living in, your local Ausländerbehörde may be overloaded with requests. Be patient and persistent, especially when it comes to booking an appointment online.

Once you’ve lined up that allimportant appointment, it’s time to show off all of the papers you’ve worked so hard to collect! Bring along your rental contract, your university letter of admission, proof of health insurance, and confirmation of registration at your local Meldeamt. (And don’t forget your passport and a biometric passport photo.) Fill out the permit application itself – the Antrag auf Erteilung eines Aufenthaltstitels, available online – and bring along 100 euros for your registration fee. The Ausländerbehörde will either issue your student residence permit card on the spot or tell you when it will be ready for collection (usually about six weeks later).

PAY TO TUNE IN

Don’t be surprised when a bill arrives in the mail for your so-called Rundfunkbeitrag : the obligatory contribution to public television and radio. Everyone who moves into a flat or house in Germany has to pay it – even if you don’t own a TV or a radio. Contributions amount to about 18 euros per month or 220 euros per year and can be paid monthly, quarterly, or annually.

If you don’t pay, brace yourself for continuous reminders and, eventually, a hefty fine. If you

ignore that too, a prison sentence might loom, so just pay promptly. Besides, tuning into the radio is great for your German language skills, and you can access public broadcasting media libraries too.

EARN SPARE CHANGE

Feel like you’ll need some more cash on hand to enjoy all Germany has to offer? Consider getting what the Germans call a minijob (officially: Kurzfristige Beschäftigung, or short-term employment).

As of 2024, students living in Germany on a study or research visa are legally allowed to earn 556 euros a month of virtually nontaxed income.

You read that right: taxes for that income bracket are low. Employers in this case usually don’t require you to make income tax or pension contributions. Especially in bigger cities like Berlin or Munich, rent can be quite expensive, and having some pocket change for the club – ahem, we mean culturally-enriching events and lectures – can come in handy. Keep in mind that if you earn more than the minijob limit, you’ll be in a different tax bracket, too.

Contact university career services or ask your department about minijob openings there. Most jobs will usually only require around 10 hours of work a month, though as long as you’re earning the German minimum wage of 12.41 euros an hour, this is flexible.

Online portals like LinkedIn, Zenjob, Minijob-Zentrale, and Minijob-Anzeigen have listings as well, with everything from stocking drugstore shelves to delivering groceries by bike.

When in doubt, there’s always the time-honored method of running around town with a stack of résumés and a smile.

Shapingthe future European University

Studyprogrammesfullof opportunitiesatthe European University Viadrina Frankfur t (Oder) in Germany–international, personal,successful

CUTTING-EDGE

With billions of euros in funding allotted to its research institutes, Germany is home to some of the world’s quirkiest and most complex scientific research projects today

BY SAM GURWITT ILLUSTRATION SARAH MAFFÉÏS

MOON-DUST SOLAR PANELS

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITÄT

BERLIN

Researchers aim to manufacture solar cells with resources abundant on the moon

It’s not easy to get solar panels to the moon. Yet if humans ever build a base there, they’ll need them. Researchers at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) may have found a solution. A team in the department of space technology aims to manufacture solar cells with two ingredients that are abundant there: lunar dust and sunlight.

Shooting prefabricated solar panels to the moon would be prohibitively expensive. “We want to use resources that are on the moon,” explains aerospace engineer Juan Carlos Ginés Palomares, who leads the research project. A collaboration with JPM Silicon, it’s funded by the German Aerospace Center.

It’s just one application of moon dust being studied at TU Berlin. Other teams are looking into possibly using it for construction materials or even 3D printing.

For a few billion years, rocks careening through space have slammed into the moon, pulverizing its surface into a fine dust called lunar regolith. About 4 to 10 meters of the substance now cover the surface, says Stefan Linke, who heads the depart­

ment’s Exploration and Propulsion Working Group, which conducts the regolith research. Thanks to samples brought to earth by NASA’s Apollo missions, scientists know not only the chemical composition of lunar regolith but also the size of its grains. A research facility at TU Berlin crushes various minerals to simulate the material.

Producing a solar cell requires creating a layer of silicon on a glass surface. The researchers are experimenting with a process that doesn’t require extracting silicon from regolith first. Instead, they create glass by melting regolith between 1300 and 1500 degrees Celsius, depending on the type of dust. Next, they coat the glass with a layer of aluminum so thin that the metal can be extracted from rovers left on the moon.

Heating this aluminumcoated glass triggers a chemical reaction that produces a layer of silicon. After further chemical processing, this piece of glass becomes a functioning solar cell. Ginés Palomares says his team has produced small patches of silicon on a piece of regolith glass. He hopes to produce an even coating by the end of 2024.

BEETHOVEN’S BEAT

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EMPIRICAL AESTHETICS, FRANKFURT AM MAIN

What can a few strands of Beethoven’s hair tell us about how he came by his musical talent?

Two hundred years after his death, what can a few strands of Ludwig van Beethoven’s hair tell us about the great composer’s musical talent? That’s what researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main and their international collaborators wanted to know. Published in 2024, their study examines whether the strands of DNA hidden in that famously unruly hair showed a genetic propensity for rhythm.

“We decided to make no specific predictions and instead see this as an opportunity ... to discuss exactly why we cannot at the moment predict an individual’s musical future based on a genome,” says Miriam Mosing, head of the institute’s behavior genetics unit. The team discovered that – rhythmically speaking – Beethoven’s genes were unremarkable. They more closely resembled the genes of people who report that they cannot clap on a beat than those who can.

Mosing and the Frankfurt team were building on an extensive study into the genetic links to musicality recently undertaken with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholin­

guistics in the Netherlands, the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, Vanderbilt University in the US, and others.

In 2022, the teams worked with the US ­ based genetic testing company 23andMe to explore the genetic basis for rhythm, analyzing the genomes of over 600,000 people of European descent. The researchers managed to pinpoint 69 different locations on the human genome that seemed to correlate with a person’s reported ability to clap on a beat. This, in turn, allowed the scientists to create what’s called a polygenic score (PGS) for the musical skill called beat synchronization.

After a separate group of researchers sequenced Beethoven’s genome in 2023, genetic researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt had an idea: to use the data from their earlier studies to calculate Beethoven’s own PGS for beat synchronization. That his score was low only underlines that Beethoven’s staggering musical talent –including his indisputable genius with rhythm – depended on a lot more than just the genetic traits embedded in his DNA.

PHILOLOGY OF ADVENTURE

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN

Researchers explore the literary history of adventure, from centuries ago right on up to today

“Your extraordinary adventure awaits,” announces an ad for Air New Zealand. Don’t forget to bring your Nalgene water bottle “for your everyday adventure.” “Say yes to #hairventures.”

As these and countless other slogans make clear, adventure sells. And advertisers peddling it can pique our imaginations by tapping into millennia of literary history. For the last seven years, scholars at Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München (LMU) have been taking a deep dive into the history of the concept of adventure.

With fewer and fewer people writing literature professionally these days, the researchers wanted to “touch the core of our fascination with narratives,” says Martin von Koppenfels, an LMU professor who initiated the study. The central idea? “To research the elementary driving forces of narrative using a single term, namely adventure,” he says.

With funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the project – called “Philology of Adventure” – brings together literary scholars to approach the concept from their

respective areas of expertise. The group has met regularly to analyze texts and present their work. Events include discussions with contemporary authors.

In the European narrative tradition, the modern understanding of the term “adventure” traces back to stories from the High Middle Ages (ca. 1050 to 1250 CE): those tales in which an aristocratic hero sets out on a quest for adventure. Later, during the Enlightenment, adventure stories began to be “denigrated as childish, premodern, naïve,” says von Koppenfels. That’s when literature began to focus on more realistic world representations.

But adventure narratives didn’t die out. They simply rebranded. With the vast expan sion of literacy in the 19th century, a new market emerged, especially for youth and children’s literature. Adventure narratives thrived.

The conflict between “our fantasies and our social reality,” as von Koppenfels puts it, is still a fundamental feature of literature and narrative art. Perhaps that’s why the Nalgene brand of plastic is urging us to “find adventure” in everyday life – with a water bottle in hand.

BEE POETRY

FILMUNIVERSITÄT BABELSBERG KONRAD WOLF

Perhaps one day, bee-to-poem translation will be possible with the use of artificial intelligence

With the help of humans and computers, Potsdam’s bees are becoming poets. An interdisciplinary group of artists and technology experts at Filmuniversität Babelsberg is immersed in a novel art project: a poetic soundwalk that “translates” emotional and sensory expressions of bees into poetry. There’s power, they posit, in trying to decipher what bees say to each other.

“There are other types of intelligence in the world, not only human intelligence,” says Ula Sowa Przybylska, the artist and “visual anthropologist” leading the project. In 2023, Przybylska won an award from the university’s Institute for Artistic Research, which is now funding the project.

A few researchers, including computer scientist Tim Landgraf of the Freie Universität Berlin, have been able to use AI to translate a few “basics” of bee language and even communicate back to them. But Przybylska and her team of (mostly) artists want to understand bees on a more emotional level.

The science of bee language allows only a glimpse into their communication patterns. AI can

help analyze things like “what times of day they do what waggle dance, and what’s the behavior that comes after this,” she says. “But AI can’t really tell us anything about their culture.” That’s why she and her team are letting the arts do what computers can’t.

The Potsdam team will use AI to analyze existing data and their own recordings of bees to see what comes about. To make the “translations” more accessible to humans, Przybylska and her team have partnered with two poets. One will focus on sensory details, creating rhythms and sounds that mimic vibrations and other patterns with which bees communicate. The other will address the content of communication.

The poetry is hardly a straight translation, but that’s not the point. The goal is to create something that will help people better understand bees, and more broadly natural surroundings, says Angela Brennecke, a Babelsberg professor who is supporting the project. The material the team collects and its experiences with AI may help advance the research so that one day bee-topoem translation is possible.

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DRONES IN HISTORY

LEIBNIZ INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON SOCIETY AND SPACE, ERKNER

Researchers are examining how mapping tools can help historians trace the past

The natural and social sciences are making well-known use of applications for mapping and drone imagery. Soon historians, too, may be adding them to their toolkit of materials.

A group of researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) based in Erkner, near Berlin, is studying how geodata – for example, from both recent and historical maps as well as drone imagery – can enhance historical research. Geodata is the information about a geographical location used for GIS mapping. The pilot project could help historians compare historical maps with modern aerial footage in order to examine spatial change and its social ramifications over time.

With a grant from the state of Brandenburg, IRS recently bought equipment to record and analyze geodata, including devices to collect it, powerful software, and even a drone. The DFG’s National Research Data Initiative “NFDI4Memory” also contributed funding.

Now comes the work of determining precisely how this kind of equipment could help historians.

“This is the question: If we have our classic historical sources, as well as social data – for example on the social structure of a certain area – can geodata help us gain new insights?” asks Rita Gudermann, one of the researchers. She and her colleagues are experimenting in an area around the Senftenberger See, an artificial lake that was once an openpit lignite mine. As East German authorities filled in the mine beginning in 1967, they created a new settlement of dachas nearby. The plans for that settlement are in Brandenburg’s state archive.

If researchers can locate specific points on those historical maps and then go into the field and record their geodata, they can create layers of multiple maps and see what changed over time.

The geodata act like pins, ensuring that the maps are all exactly aligned. By collecting social data such as who owned which dacha, the researchers then can analyze the social aspects of spatial change. Who ended up building a shed, or planting a vegetable garden, or filling in a pool? “We are still collecting and experimenting,” says Gudermann.

FUNGAL ARCHITECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF STUTTGART

Fungi could be used to design building parts like insulating panels and even bricks

As anyone who has ever battled mold at home will tell you, fungi have the power to eat away at buildings and destroy them. They may also have the power to hold them up.

“There are lots of techniques for destroying fungi in architecture. We want the opposite. We want to create building materials using fungi,” says architect Martin Ostermann, a professor who leads the Institute of Building Construction at the University of Stuttgart. Since 2018, Ostermann has been researching how to create building materials with fungi. It’s part of an innovative trend in architecture: mycelium building.

Germany aims for climate neutrality by 2045. To meet that goal, the construction industry needs climate-friendly materials. Of the four main building materials used today – concrete, steel, masonry, and wood – only wood is considered sustainable due to its ability to store carbon. But it takes the greater part of a century to grow to maturity, and when it burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.

Mushrooms, on the other hand, grow fast. Ostermann

and his team are using mycelium – the dense network of tiny threads with which fungi absorb nutrients – to essentially “grow” building parts like insulating panels and even bricks. So far, they have mostly used the edible species ganoderma lucidum, also called reishi mushrooms.

First, they add the fungus to a substrate on which it colonises, feeds, and grows. That can be wood chips, or paper, or hemp, or any number of other plant-based substances that contain cellulose.

They then fill the mixture into a mold and let it sit. As the mycelium grows, “it searches for nutrients, breaks apart [the substrate], and connects all the bits. You can basically think about the mycelium as a kind of glue,” says Ostermann. That process takes about six days, a blip compared to the time it takes to grow timber. Then, the researchers heat and dry out the material, stopping fungal growth.

The team has experimented with a number of different forms. With enough different shapes and material properties, it may someday be possible to construct an entire building using fungalgrown parts.

FAMILY

Academics from abroad are balancing parenting and careers, for better or worse. University administrators are trying to help

BY BARBARA WOOLSEY

PHOTOS TOBIAS NICOLAI

They say life imitates art. In academia, life sometimes imitates research. That’s the case for Sarah Penteado, 41, a doctoral student in the University of Bremen’s Faculty of Social Sciences. While immersed in research on social protection policies in Mozambique, for the past decade she’s been earning a shadow degree in the school of life, learning first-hand about family policy in Germany – as a mom.

Penteado moved to Germany from Brazil in 2012 to start a master’s in international relations. She’s now a doctoral fellow at the university’s Global Dynamics of Social Policy collaborative research center. She gave birth to her first daughter in 2014, and took another leave in 2021 to have a second child.

Penteado hopes to land a postdoctoral research position after getting her degree next year. But German universities rely on fixed-term contracts, which makes long-term job security in academia uncertain.

international researchers advance in their careers, most face high barriers to tenure, including a systemic preference for German-language proficiency.

Germany gets high marks from global academics for its quality of life, social services, and rich sources of research funding. But while parental leave is generous compared to other countries (up to three years per child), many researchers say it’s hard to take more than a few months off when their families grow.

“Your job is insecure and you are under a lot of time pressure to publish journal articles and apply for grants [while] taking care of, teaching, and supervising students,” says Keonhi Son, a postdoctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).

Parenting can make things trickier. Son, who researches global gender policies, women’s labor, and economic rights, notes that German law entitles early childhood education from the age of one. Yet finding childcare is challenging, she says. In 2022, the State Monitor of Early Childhood Education predicted Germany’s Kindertagesstätten (called Kitas) would be short almost 400,000 spots by 2023.

Social policies like Elterngeld (parental benefits) and Elternzeit (parental leave) are the envy of parents outside of Europe. “But to really work, you need childcare,” Son says, “especially if you don’t have extended family or informal networks to rely on.” So parents from abroad – mothers in particular –face more obstacles to success in academia, Son says. Indeed, the proportion of non-German female postdocs is relatively low, accoreding to a 2017 University of Duisburg/Essen study. It’s “an especially difficult situation if you come from abroad and are still learning the language or creating a network,” Son says.

Whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, starting a family while climbing Germany’s academic ladder is no small feat – even more so for researchers from abroad. The Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (the German Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act) – or WissZeitVG – has been regulating working conditions in German academia since 2007. It’s made fixed-term contracts – often dependent on renewal of external, third-party funding and grants – the status quo. Stringing together a series of generally one-year contracts, year after year, can feel precarious. As

Aysegül Kayaoglu, formerly an associate professor of economics at Istanbul Technical University, says settling into German academic life is challenging. In 2023, she moved with her husband and two schoolaged children from Turkey for two posts: as a researcher at the non-profit International Security and Development Center (ISDC) in Berlin and a oneyear visiting fellow at the University of Osnabrück’s Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS). Unable to find an apartment in Berlin, she and her family now live in Osnabrück. She travels frequently to Bremen, a two-hour commute, for a temporary research project. “Time poverty has affected me a lot,” says Kayaoglu. “Work, childcare, and domestic responsibilities take up all of our time.” Keen to attract more talent from near and far, Germany has been working to improve conditions. The WissZeitVG underwent another reform in 2024. The Trade Union for Education and Research

Growing pains: Balancing family and academia is no small feat in Germany

Some institutions of higher learning have improved family services in recent years precisely to attact more scholars from abroad

(GEW) has also called for a stop to the automatic deduction of scholarships and other third-party funding from the government’s parental allowances.

Not all postdocs see fixed-term positions in such a poor light. Some try to use the flexibility to balance families and careers. That’s the case for Andrey Sobolev, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich). Since moving from Moscow in 2009, he’s completed his doctorate at LMU, held a series of stable fixed-term positions in neurobiology, and become a father three years ago. Sobolev opted against parental leave; his partner took just one month. “We both choose our working hours, so we take turns with our daughter,” he says. “We didn’t have any family [nearby], or even close friends.” They got by.

Some institutions of higher learning have improved family services in recent years precisely to

attract more scholars from abroad.

The University of Göttingen is known for a high proportion of students and faculty from abroad. Home to nine research institutes employing around 6,000 researchers, it’s developed its own additional unique selling point: a range of on-campus childcare, some with an international focus.

Students got the ball rolling.

In 2010, the student union (Studierendenwerk) opened an “innovative daycare center.” It offered German-English immersion care and multicultural activities. The North Campus bilingual center, one of six daycare venues run by

the Studentenwerk, now offers 55 spots for children ages 1 to 6. Of those spots, 22 are reserved for the children of researchers.

Other research institutes in Göttingen offer their own daycare centers. Back in 2014, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research opened Kosmos Kids, a Montessori-style bilingual program with 18 childcare spots; 11 are reserved for MPI researchers.

Smitha Narayanamurthy, a scientist researching the sun and heliosphere, is one of them. She and her husband moved to Germany in 2015 for a fellowship at the MPI for Solar System Research. And in 2019, she gave birth to her daughter, who’s been at Kosmos Kids for the last four years.

Sobolov, the LMU postdoc researcher based in Munich, says he may face challenges with respect to fixed-term contracts. Yet he and his partner “have gotten lucky in other ways,” he says. The couple found an affordable apartment in a good neighborhood and a spot at a Kita nearby. Sobolov sees colleagues with young children pulling it off too. “I looked for examples of how other [parents] did it, what made sense for them, and of course, that they survived.”

PUT IN PERSPECTIVE

Like many other parts of the world, Germany is seeing increasing polarization. Cottbus, for one, has become a stronghold of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland. Can a thriving, diverse university population help change this town in the former East?

BY CHIPONDA CHIMBELU ILLUSTRATION SOFIA HYDMAN

On a train from Berlin to Cottbus, we pass a town somewhere in the Spreewald Forest. From my seat in the double-decker coach, I spot an election poster: “Jetzt AfD” (Now AfD).

It’s late April, and this region, formerly part of communist East Germany, is now a stronghold of the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The poster has been placed high enough for an average German man to reach – perhaps a sign the far-right here doesn’t fear anyone vandalizing or tearing down their posters. Should I as a Black gay man be afraid? I’m going to Cottbus for just two days, to see how university students from abroad are faring in the current political climate. Some German friends have warned me against traveling alone to the second-largest city in the state of Brandenburg. But speaking with many international students and alumni of Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU) in advance of my stay has convinced me I’ll be safe there on my own.

“The view of people that Cottbus may be racist is not wrong, but I think that changed over the years,” Clement Uzoanya, a recent BTU alumnus from Nigeria told me on a Zoom call before my trip. BTU has around 6,800 students, most

of them on its main campus in Cottbus, population circa 100,000. While most German towns are grappling with a housing crisis, it’s still fairly easy to find affordable accommodation here. That’s helped attract international students to BTU.

Two in five BTU students hail from abroad. And that cohort includes some 900 Indian nationals – the largest share – followed by Bangladeshi and Pakistani students. Rising numbers of degree programs offered in English are drawing more internationals, not just to BTU but to universities throughout Germany.

Uzoanya’s own introduction to Cottbus was bumpy. It was October 2019, and he spent his very first night in Germany at the Cottbus central station. He got to town around midnight after severe flight delays and a missed rail connection – too late to reach

his accommodation. Exhausted from the journey from Nigeria, he slept on the chairs in the main hall. He had been warned that Cottbus would be less than welcoming to foreigners. But after living in Africa’s most populous country, the Nigerian national wasn’t too fazed by Brandenburg. Looking back, he says that “serenity, security, no harassment” marked his time at BTU. He earned a master of science in environmental and resource management in 2022. “I began to wonder, ‘Why are these people saying these things?’” he recalls.

Uzoanya was able to shrug off what he’d heard, but as my train approaches the station, I still feel nervous. Seeing black and brown faces waiting on the platform as I disembark gives me reason to be hopeful. “If they can be here, so can I,” I think. Unfortunately, Uzoanya won’t be meeting me. He had mulled staying on after his studies, but moved to Berlin in 2022 and works as a sustainability expert at a mobility company.

Ever since a spate of right-wing violence in the region made headlines in the 1990s and 2000s, the public has associated Cottbus with an active farright scene. The city has had more recent incidents of hate speech and physical harassment of foreigners and minorities. Apparently, many voters here harbor

strong anti-immigrant sentiment. In the European parliamentary elections held on June 9, 2024, the AfD won 29 percent of the vote – the largest share.

Uzoanya first heard of the AfD and its political goals while living in Cottbus. “That’s when I understood that there are people here who are anti-immigrant, and they are ready to kick every immigrant out at the slightest opportunity,” he says.

And yet he remembers feeling comfortable in the town. Perhaps that’s because he spent most of his time on campus, Uzoanya notes.

The other current and former BTU international students I speak with during my two days on campus describe similar experiences. To them Cottbus is a sleepy town in the heart of Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz), a scenic region that straddles Germany and Poland. The area is known on both sides of the border for its rich deposits of brown coal.

Though situated today in one of the country’s poorest regions, Cottbus was once a thriving indus-

Einheit, so named to commemorate reunification in 1990. In this throng, it is hard to believe that just last September, a far-right local AfD candidate named Lars Schieske ran for mayor on an anti-immigration platform. He made it all the way to a runoff, but ultimately lost by a wide margin to the center-left candidate, social democrat Tobias Schick (SPD). All the same, nearly one in three Cottbus voters supported the AfD in that race.

Professor Heike Radvan, who has researched right-wing extremism for years, noted those election results with alarm. She is co-author of the university’s “Action plan against (far) right influence

2024, police had yet to complete their investigation of the incidents.

Radvan, who teaches theory and methods of social work, believes BTU needs to actively protect students and faculty both on campus and in the city. So far, Radvan and Dyhr’s action plan has led to a series of anti-discrimination workshops for BTU staff and faculty as well as the creation of a platform for anonymously reporting incidents of discrimination of any kind on campus. The portal is launching in summer 2024, and Radvan hopes it will increase awareness of prevalent types of discrimination and where they take place.

“This is the first action plan launched by a German university that focuses on right-wing extremism,” she says, noting that most universities only have general anti-discrimination efforts without data collection.

As part of this action plan, BTU has been working with town authorities and police. They have tried to

As part of an action plan, BTU Cottbus has been working with town authorities and police. They have tried to address fears among students related to alleged arson attacks

trial hub. It was the most important coal and energy supplier in East Germany. But all of that is being wound down as Europe’s biggest economy phases out fossil fuels to meet climate goals. In June the European Commission gave the green light for the German federal government to transfer 1.75 billion euros to help Lusatia through this transition.

Cottbus is meanwhile going through its very own Strukturwandel (structural transformation), and its university is playing a big part. BTU is receiving millions of euros in extra funding from the state of Brandenburg to spur research and innovation in the region over the next decade. It has been pursuing an internationalization strategy, aiming to raise its profile at home and abroad. A key aspect of this strategy is attracting more foreign students.

On BTU’s sprawling campus, I notice benches with the phrase “Kein Platz für Rassismus” (No room for racism). Asian, Arab, African, and white students rush to class across the Platz der Deutschen

at BTU” with Susanne Dyhr, the academic program coordinator. Published in January 2023, the paper gives a detailed analysis of on- and off-campus incidents that could fall within the “spectrum of (extreme) right manifestations.”

It mentions far-right discourse on campus, attacks in the city, and even potential cases of racial profiling by the local police. The report doesn’t include two cases of suspected arson that occurred in November 2022. That month, corridors in several university residence halls were set alight. The following month, there were suspicious fires in mailboxes in a dorm that primarily houses international students. As of June

address fears among students relating to the alleged arson attacks. Early last year, at the university’s invitation, they also held a roundtable on campus. “We were able to introduce ourselves, and we could also drive away many fears about what had happened,” says Oskar Vurgun, the head of Cottbus Police. In his office, just minutes away from the university’s main building, Vurgun says language obstacles pose a challenge for his force. Few of his older colleagues, he says, are comfortable speaking English – the language most international students have in common. And very few in his force speak Arabic, he says. Vurgun wishes his team were more diverse. Among other things, Radvan and Dyhr’s action plan mentions instances of racial profiling at the train station, something the police deny. None of the students I spoke with described experiencing racial profiling by the police.

As for being “profiled” more generally, it is possible that foreign students are not fully aware

of their rights, especially when it comes to verbal aggression. “Friends told me about being insulted on the streets,” Ingrid Bapfubusa Niyibizi says, sipping a cup of coffee in the Mensa. An agroecology doctoral student from Cameroon, Niyibizi says her friends didn’t report those incidents to the police. They brushed off the attacks because they thought the perpetrators were drunk.

Vurgun, the policeman, thinks this is a mistake: “Every insult and crime that goes unreported creates the risk of a different perception and different expression between dark and light fields.”

Meanwhile, the local LGBTQ+ organization, which serves the queer community both in town and on campus, has been targeted in attacks. And it is keeping track. The pride flag at its Regenbogenkombinat (the Rainbow Center) is destroyed repeatedly. In 2023 alone, its rainbow banner was torn down 16 times. Student member Tom Hoffmann says the organization reported every single incident to the police and then replaced the vandalized banner. But vandalism keeps occurring, says the BTU social work student. The police confirm this, adding that rainbow flags are destroyed in other parts of Cottbus too. The authorities believe the incidents are “politically motivated.”

Hoffmann grew up in the region and is now in his second semester. And while he can move “quite freely” around town, he feels safer avoiding some areas. He believes he has to underplay his support for anti-discrimination in some parts of Cottbus, so he doesn’t always display his LGBTQ+ and antiracism buttons. “There might be people who see that critically, especially now with the political developments here,” he says.

The rising popularity of the AfD has led to a right-wing shift in public discourse, and that has “normalized what was once unspeakable,” he says. If more residents tolerate hate speech, then living in Cottbus will be increasingly untenable for some, Hoffmann says. He worries that more and more people are forced to choose between remaining silent or having to leave places and situations in which they hear discriminatory language or hate speech.

According to the BTU action plan, people who are “read as left-leaning” have also been targets of extreme-right violence.

Asked about the situation for LGBTQ+ individuals on campus, Hoffmann says he feels alone. We’re sitting on a concrete bench behind the university library when our conversation is paused; I’ve just recognized Harriet Kinga, from Cameroon. The doctoral student in environmental resource management is on her way out the building. A week earlier,

I’d spoken with her and three other students. After Kinga leaves, Hoffmann mentions it took him a while to even notice that BTU had a substantial international student population. “I rarely see them around the city, at least not in the places I go,” he says. “I don’t have much contact with students who aren’t in my program.”

This apparently goes both ways. Most of the international students I spoke with told me they have little direct contact with German students – mainly because many are in advanced degree programs taught in English. This group also has less time for socializing. Many spend their free time studying, and some commute from Berlin, where the sort of part-time jobs that can help students cover living expenses are abundant.

While there are fewer economic opportunities for international students in Cottbus, BTU remains attractive because of the city’s relatively low cost of living.

Shahar, an enterprise resource management student who prefers to give her first name only for this story, came to BTU from Kerala, India, in 2019. She plans to spend the next four years working on her doctorate. Shahar believes the university’s new degree program in artificial intelligence will draw a significant number of international students. For her, living in Cottbus has not only meant the freedom associated with living away from her strict family but also, as a woman, the ability to move around freely.

Cottbus may be a hotspot of far-right activity. Whether more internationals come – or even stay – may depend on how safe they feel here. As for me, some of the fears of navigating Cottbus as a Black gay man lessened during my brief visit. That was in great part thanks to the students who shared their stories with me.

AJOB IN 3MINUTES

Dr ea mjob: Th eUAS Professor ship –P rof. JuliaKes sler is a re se arch er an d le cturer of ad ditive ma nufa cturin g at Nied er rh ein UA S. Sh ecom bine s re se arch an d te aching with prac tica lk now-how.

TheProfessorship at a UniversityofApplied Sciences

What makes aprofessorship at aUniversityofAppliedSciences so special?

Fo rm e, it ’s th echa ncetos et my own sp ecifi cfocus in le cturin ga nd re se archin g whil ep re pa ring stud ents fo rtheir ca re er s. Working at aUniversityofApplied Sciences (UAS )ischa ll en ging an dhig hlydiver se –f ro mtea chin ga nd prac tice -o riente d re se archin gtoe st ab lishin gco- op eratio ns with bu sine ss ente rp rise s. If this so un ds like yo ur thin g, th en aUAS is th erig ht placefor yo u.

What makes Universities of Applied Sciences so strong in thefield of research?

Univer sities of Ap plie dS cien ce sten dto ma intain stro ng co nn ec tion stosma ll an d medium-sized businesses (SME s),enabling th em to te acha nd re se arch in aver y app lication -o rie nted ma nn er.T he effi cient tran sfer of info rm atio nf ro mind us tr yto univer sity an db acka ga in he lpstod rive research anddevelopment in afast, flexible an dinterdiscip lina ry way.

What is achievableata UniversityofApplied Sciences?

Univer sities of Applied Sciences turn outhighlyspe cialised ,practice- oriented youngprofe ssionals ,while also concentratingonthe needsofS ME s. Th ey also know howtoreact to newdevelopment s in afl exible,solution- oriented an dinterdisciplinary way. With th eirinnovations in th efi elds of te chnology,e conomics , digitalisation ,h ealthc areand mobility, UA Smakesignific antcontributions towardsfindingsolutions to today’smos t importantchallenge s.

VOX POPS

Leipzig, the largest city in former East Germany after Berlin, is known as a student oasis, a rich political history, and a cultural hub. On its streets and in its parks, students share their thoughts on politics, life, and what Germany means to them

BY SAM GURWITT PHOTOS BASTIAN THIERY

Raúl Joaquin

Luciano Montero, 27 Dominican Republic

bachelor’s student in film production, SAE Institute

I was almost done with my bachelor’s degree in advertising in the DR [Dominican Republic] and thought “OK, I want to study film now.” My sister was living in Leipzig. She asked me if I wanted to come here. I said yes. I didn’t really think, “Oh, what is Germany going to be like?” I saw an opportunity to study film, and I came. And everything was a surprise. A good one. I love Leipzig. It’s very alternative, so everybody’s their own person.

For me it’s fun to just see everybody dressing how they want and doing the things they want to do. I like going to the city center with my girlfriend on weekends when it’s full of people. There is a skate park, and we sit and drink bubble tea and watch people skate.

When I was in the DR, I was just another student. Here, I became “the guy from the DR.” I’m meeting a lot of people from different countries; we’re all learning the language. I enjoy being not German in Germany. I wish people were a bit more open with [other] languages, though. In my experience, a lot of [Leipzigers] don’t feel comfortable speaking English.

Helena von Beyme, 23 Germany

bachelor’s student in romance studies, concentration in Spanish and Italian, Uni Leipzig

I’m from Berlin and find Leipzig really great. I tell everyone that – maybe a little too often. It’s very green, very student-oriented, very alternative. There’s a lot of art and opportunities to make music. I make dreamy, melancholy singer-songwriter stuff. I sing and play guitar. I have a song coming out this summer.

Germany is very individualistic. This culture of complaining is super annoying, though. It occurred to me recently when I was talking to my neighbors. It was June, and they were complaining that it was too warm, and it was only 23 degrees. It was totally laughable! In my ideal Germany, that attitude would’t exist.

Ludwig Grosse, 23 Germany

bachelor’s student in American studies, Uni Leipzig

I was born in the US but I grew up in Berlin. I spent a year in high school in Thousand Oaks, California, and more recently a year abroad in Oklahoma. Obviously, you miss a lot of things while you’re away. For example, the food. I mostly missed falafel. Also the accessible public space here, which is beautiful.

I live in the eastern part of Leipzig. At first people felt a bit distant to me because they were all so cool. I felt like “Ah, do I belong?” But it got easier. I love it. There’s so much opportunity – compared to Berlin, where a lot of places have settled. A lot of things students do here, things they stand for, are not the same things people outside of Leipzig have in mind. It’s a nice bubble. My bubble.

Noman Taseer, 24 Pakistan

bachelor’s student in physics, Uni Leipzig

I was born and raised in Pakistan. I am from the province of Punjab, where my hometown is Gujrat.

I’ve been in Leipzig for two and a half years. It’s really versatile in culture. That’s one of the things I like about Germany and Leipzig. There are a lot of international students, you know. It’s a multicultural city, and most of the people I encounter can speak English.

Making friends within the international community is really easy because they are looking for friends too. But for Germans, it’s the complete opposite. The main cultural difference about friends here and back in my home country is that there, we just sit and talk over nothing, but if you want to hang out with German friends, you have to make specific plans.

You know, you have to tell your German friends, “We’re going to play a football game, we’re going to watch a football game, we’re going to do something,” right? Here, sports are my go-to – it’s like a pickup line for me.

Mahlet Salome Negatu, 25 Germany

bachelor’s student in romance studies, concentration in Spanish and Italian, Uni Leipzig

I moved here in 2020 – primetime Corona. It was turbulent at first. Because I come from a small town, I was excited to move to a larger, more vibrant place. There’s a lot of opportunity and cultural richness that I didn’t have in Göttingen. What I really like about Leipzig is that the leftist scene here is really active and present. And I can feel comfortable as a Black person, at least within the city. I didn’t let what other people said stop me from moving. But yeah, I have to say, since the European Parliament elections [in June 2024, when the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) political

Paulina Tönneßen, 25 Germany

education student, Uni Leipzig

I’m from Bonn. I like the combination of the green and the urban here. I like that in summer I can bike out to the lake and swim in the evening but can also meet friends on the street and go for a drink. It’s also a very socially engaged city. People are really committed to positive causes.

I think I was sort of naïve before the [June 2024] elections. I didn’t expect these results. It shook me awake.

But even if the results show the AfD gaining ground here, there’s more to Saxony – and Leipzig – than just that. Many people here are fighting for the opposite ideals.

Paula Thiery, 26 Germany

education student, Uni Leipzig

party topped the polls in eastern Germany] … when I saw the actual numbers, I thought, woah, ok, Leipzig, I like it here, but in the long term that is, indeed, a reason to move away.

I wish it didn’t take something bad happening for people to see there’s a problem. I think it’s important that we work together because it doesn’t just affect us [people of color], but rather all of society.

A better Germany would be more open. More open to people with migrant backgrounds. More diversity, more awareness of non-White people.

I do think my perception of the city has changed over time. When I arrived [from Göttingen] I was pretty naïve and thought everything was great. Over time, I’ve begun to focus on spaces where people have similar priorities. I play football in a sports club, and we’re a Flinta team – we have trans people and non-binary people. That’s the football world that I’m a part of, and we talk a lot about trans*, inter*, and non-binary topics. When we come into contact with other teams, [we see] that’s not a part of their lived reality. It’s sort of a peek into another world, outside of this student bubble.

Ingmar Herrmann, 26 Germany

art student, painting and graphic design, HGB

I’ve lived my whole life in Leipzig. I definitely want to stay here for now, at least. The HGB was always my dream university. And also simply because my roots and my family are here too.

As for changes in the city, of course, there’s a lot to say. Many shops simply couldn’t survive and were replaced with major chains. It’s painful to see the second Starbucks open within 100 meters of another, for instance. And it feels like there are now 100,000 DMs [a drugstore chain].

Maybe I just had a different perspective before, but because of the current moment, I feel a very uncomfortable tension especially in certain concentrated areas in the city. On weekends, as night closes in, I’ve had a few bad experiences, for instance when wearing makeup. It sometimes almost ended with physical altercations and insults.

Demonstrations are one thing where Leipzig definitely shows up. It’s a way of saying “We’re standing here en masse, and we’re showing that we have a problem with something.” That’s one way forward. The other way is through direct interactions. I think places where people can interact and exchange thoughts are unbelievably important. If interactions across different classes were supported more, that would make the situation and the political climate better.

Muhammed Alieu Barry, 34 Gambia

master’s student, business administration, Uni Leipzig

It’s very quiet here. That was one of my first impressions. I like the integration with nature – with plants, the forest, the rivers. I like cycling. And it’s always nice to visit the park. I also like to run. Every weekend I run in Clara-Zetkin-Park.

There are people here who are really welcoming, and then we have some elements that are not so welcoming. I think that’s normal. When somebody doesn’t know something, there is always that apprehension at first. And this is why, for me, interactions do help. Because then they understand there is substance behind the face.

I’ve seen internationals, for example, struggle more to get

even a simple cleaning job. Somebody would be looking for a C1 language certificate in German for a job cleaning. Somebody who has gone through school and earned a master’s degree in whatever field – come on!

There are so many things that students can do, but opportunities for them are limited. The [local] population could be more willing to integrate immigrants – because really, it’s a global world we are living in right now. Any German can move into any country. And so, if others come to Germany, regardless of whether they’re from – Africa or Asia or anywhere else – that reciprocity needs to be there.

Learnmore aboutGermany ’s most innovative university.

Experience theessence of FAU–where innovation hasbeenthrivingsince 1743.Withover270 degree programs,FAU is your gatewaytolimitless possibilities.

German universities have a language all their own. Key terms to help cut through all that jargon

DEFINING VOCABULARY

BY DEBORAH STEINBORN ILLUSTRATION SARAH MAFFÉÏS

BAFÖG, das (German Federal Train ing Assistance Act ) 1. the acronym for Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz , a law regulating govern ment-funded financial aid for students in higher education. 2. the grants and loans provided by that law. Half of this financial support usually takes the form of a grant; the other half is an interest-free state loan of up to 10,000 euros, which must be repaid in installments after completion of studies.

BOLOGNA-PROZESS, der (higher-education reform) 1. a series of agreements between 49 European countries ensuring common standards of higher education (named after the University of Bologna, where education ministers from 29 countries signed a declaration in 1999). 2. introduction of a threetiered structure of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, as well as easy transfer of credits between institutions within this European bloc, which is known as the European Higher Education Area, or EHEA.

DEUTSCHER AKADEMISCHER AUSTAUSCHDIENST (DAAD), der (German Academic Exchange Service) 1. a large selfgoverning organization funded by the federal government and its states to support international academic cooperation. 2. a popular source of scholarship funding and research grants for foreigners studying in Germany.

DEUTSCHE FORSCHUNGSGEMEINSCHAFT (DFG), die (German Research Foundation) an organization that funds research at universities and other institutions through a variety of grants and prizes. It’s the largest publicly funded grant organization in Germany.

DUALES STUDIUM, das (dual study) 1. a system combining training or an apprenticeship at a company or

non-profit organization with higher education in a particular field. 2. a program mostly used by students of business administration, engineering, and social services.

ERASMUS+ (also known as Erasmus Program) 1. a student-exchange program financed by the European Union, combining all EU schemes for education, training, youth, and sports. 2. Erasmus stands for European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students.

EXZELLENZSTRATEGIE, die (excellence strategy) 1. a long-term effort by the German Ministry of Education and Research to promote cutting-edge research conditions for scholars, encourage cooperation between academic disciplines and institutions, and enhance the global reputation of German universities and research institutions. 2. an initiative awarding special status and generous funding to 10 German public universities. According to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024, eight of these so-called elite universities are among the world’s top 100: Technical University of Munich (TUM), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Heidelberg University, Charité –Universitätsmedizin Berlin (part of the Berlin University Alliance), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (also part of the Berlin University Alliance), University of Tübingen, University of Bonn, and RWTH Aachen University.

FACHKRÄFTEEINWANDERUNGS -

GESETZ , das (Immigration Act for Skilled Workers) a federal law enacted on March 1, 2020, that aims to boost the immigration of qualified individuals from abroad.

FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT, das (research institute) a research body that’s typically outside of the university system. The top four – Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz Association, Max Planck Society, and Leibniz Association – employ more than 118,000 people collectively.

GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN, die pl. (humanities) 1. academic fields of study (such as history, literature, and philosophy) that are distinct from both the social sciences and the natural sciences, formal sciences, and applied

sciences. 2. fields that investigate human constructs and concerns with a critical and interpretive (as opposed to quantitative) approach.

HABILITATION, die ( post-doctoral qualification) 1. a post-doctoral degree necessary for a full professorship at most German universities. 2. Germany’s highest academic qualification, requiring defense of a major work of independent scholarship.

HOCHSCHULE FÜR ANGEWANDTE WISSENSCHAFTEN (HAW), die (university of applied sciences) an institution of higher vocational education, often focused on specific areas such as engineering or business. On average, an institution of this kind hosts 5,000 students.

NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN, die pl. (natural sciences) 1. any of the sciences (such as physics, chemistry, geology, or biology) that deal with objectively measurable phenomena in the physical world. 2. branch of knowledge that studies the physical world.

TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE, die (technical university) a university that specializes in engineering, technology, and related fields. Some confer doctorates, while others do not.

UNIVERSITÄT (UNI), die (university) 1. an institution of higher learning with facilities for teaching and research that also awards bachelor’s and master’s degrees. German universities host on average 15,300 students. 2. an educational body with the right to confer doctorates.

WISSENSCHAFTSZEITVERTRAGSGESETZ (WISSZEITVG), das (academic fixed-term contract act) a law introduced in 2007 that regulates fixed-term employment contracts and working conditions in Germany’s academic sector.

What opportunitiesexist for foreignstudentsinGermany? What hastobeconsideredwith regard to earningoppor tunities, thesis andhealthinsurance? Find outmoreatacademics.com.

MASTHEAD

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Josh Axelrod, Chiponda Chimbelu, Judith Gilbert, Max Graef Lakin, Sam Gurwitt, Jessica Schüller, Deborah Steinborn, Camille Williams, Barbara Woolsey

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Sofia Hydman, Sarah Mafféïs

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Kurt Bauer, Renke Brandt, Jamal Cazaré, Lena Giovanazzi, Marie Haefner, Jasmina Hanf, Tom Huber, Marc Krause, Vanessa Alica Kunert, Sebastian Lock, Melina Mörsdorf, Tobias Nicolai, Amelie Niederbuchner, Allan Salas, Molly Steele, Bastian Thiery, Mario Wezel, Lukasz Wierzbowski

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Whetheratuniversitiesand research institutions,inthe public sector,atNGOs, NPOs, foundations, churches or even privateschools: Youcan find your dreamjob here. Or wouldyou rather work in Germany?

WHAT A WORD!

Academic terms can be baffling in any foreign language. Try your hand at this bilingual crossword puzzle as a fun challenge to learn them

BY DEBORAH STEINBORN ILLUSTRATION SOFIA HYDMAN

Image: Chris

(Uni