Yury T. - Bachelor Student From Ukraine
Yana Immis
Meet Yury, a talented young man, who knows you can learn everything yourself. Coding? From the book. German language? From Netflix. You can read his study in Germany success story here.
| Nationality | Ukrainian |
|---|---|
| Where did you live? | Donetsk, Kharkov (Ukraine), Bucharest (Romania) |
| Education Level Prior to Relocation | 1st Year Bachelor |
| Reason of moving to Germany | Bachelor Program |
| When did you move? | 2016 |
| How old were you? | 17 |
| Are you still in Germany? | Yes |
| What is your current occupation? | 3rd Year Bachelor Student |
| What is your future goal? | Blue Card, Work Projects in Fin Tech |
| Would you like to stay in Germany? | For now yes |
Chapter 1: I have no idea what I am doing, let’s try to change it
There is not much to tell before my relocation to Germany. I started my studies in computer science in Ukraine, but I only studied there for around 3 months. Afterward, I decided to move to Romania to be closer to my brother.
When I started paying more attention to studies though, I quickly realized that my skills in Physics (which surprisingly enough is quite intense in CS program) are very poor. Even though the course was held in English, it was tough for me to catch up with scientific disciplines. After having spent approximately a year and a half in Bucharest, I caught myself thinking that maybe for me it would be better to move someplace else for studies.
I didn’t know at that moment what I wanted to study instead. I realized that even though I was interested in programming and computers, I didn’t want to study computer science at university just because it changes too quickly. I didn’t make as many friends in Bucharest, because I didn’t speak the language and also because of that, at the time I couldn’t find any work, so I decided to explore other opportunities.
I came across an Educational Fair in Bucharest – an exhibition of private universities from abroad talked to a few representatives and signed myself up for newsletters. I didn’t really think there would be any result out of that.
Germany has never been on my radar, but, one day, I saw a full scholarship competition at a private university there. The scholarship paid for the entire course (approximately €39000 in tuition fees). The task was to write a marketing strategy for the company that sold smart thermostats across Europe.
It hit me that I wouldn’t be able to get the money to pay for the tuition fees myself and I needed to find a scholarship, that would pay for the entire thing. So I decided to try and to win it.
It was pretty fun to write it because my strategy was to invest much more effort and time than anybody else could possibly invest in writing a case. So I locked myself in a room for 2 weeks writing the case full-time. I only took occasional breaks for getting muffins from the nearest gas station.
It was fun when people actually started checking on me whether I was ok because I completely went ‘full monk’ and didn’t go online.
After waiting 2 weeks for the results, it turned out that I won and it took me a while afterward to realize it actually happened.
Chapter 2: I still have no idea what I’m doing, but something started to change
My first three semesters in Germany were a stressful mess with all kinds of possible immigration issues and hardcore studying. I’m probably the only person who read all the textbooks mentioned in the course syllabus. At the end of the 3rd semester, I saw that focusing on studies only is not doing it. I had to do something real, I wanted to practice. I wanted to understand how real companies work.
Luckily enough, 4th semester was a mandatory internship, where you have to go out and find an internship position pretty much anywhere you like.
How did I find my internship? I applied. I applied a lot. I sent around 1500 applications in 2-3 months time range and I tried all kinds of approaches and it was quite hard emotionally to stay positive about doing something for so long without any apparent results.
After going to a bunch of interviews, I ended up with 2 most appealing offers. 2 companies that offered me a position were: Allianz Technology Headquarters (Project Management Internship) and Finiata - Fin. Tech Start-Up in Berlin.
I was faced with a choice.
Should I go to a big corporation or choose a startup company?
Most people who I asked for advice told me that I should go with Allianz. However, I wanted to learn some hands-on skills, so that I could use them in my own companies later on.
And for some reason, I was strongly biased against working in big companies because I assumed that my backlog would mostly consist of bringing coffee to a specified table and scanning some random papers all the time.
As a result, I was on my way to Berlin.
My first day was a real deal. First of all, my paranoia hit me and I thought that when I was ironing a shirt in the Airbnb in the morning I forgot to turn off the iron.
So halfway to the office, I’m returning back and come to find the iron turned off. Cool, next step is sprint running back to the subway station. When I arrived at the subway station I realized that now I’m all sweaty and I really need to go back and change. 3 hours after the specified time…
…I show up at the office thinking that I’m about to get fired on my first day.
This was the day when I realized that I liked startups because even though I thought I had made a mistake that would cost me a career, my colleagues were really nice and said that it was all cool. And even more, messed up was the fact that I was literally the only person dressed up formally and I was getting friendly mocked for the rest of the day.
After this, I started paying attention to work and turns out that the relaxed atmosphere in startups doesn’t mean you don’t need to work. You’ll have to work and you’ll have to work a lot.
Deadlines are mostly tight and almost all startups by definition fight for survival. I quickly realized that my theoretical knowledge wasn’t nearly enough and I needed to learn practical skills fast. For this, I asked my boss to give me a reading list of all he wanted me to learn and I tried to put in as many hours as I could.
In order to sum up my experience, I think it’s important to cover different sides of it:
Berlin - I really loved the place
The city is very versatile. The nightlife is really impressive, especially for someone who has never lived in a big city before.
Prices may either make you happy or sad, but for me, prices in Berlin were really low compared to Munich. If you are looking for culture, Berlin has a lot to offer and I’m not even talking about galleries and museums so much.
It’s just interesting to talk to people. Most have opinions on almost everything and it doesn’t matter so much what you are interested in, you can find someone to discuss it with. I am a big fan of this city, however, if you are looking for a quiet place, I think you would be disappointed. City is full of life and almost never sleeps.
Work - once again I loved working there
The only problem was that it was my first actual work and I took it too far and burned out. Turns out the sleep is important and if you don’t rest enough your work is pretty much worthless.
But everything else was really great. You want to chill for a minute and send a meme to a Slack channel, it’s cool. You want to go and distract yourself from work - go to the resting area. You want to go and have a fancy lunch - pick a cuisine.
Where I worked there was a really cool atmosphere of meritocracy. So get your stuff done and do whatever you want.
In a retrospective, computer skills were really useful. Almost any business these days relies on digital to a certain extent. This means that if you know major web technologies, you won’t be lost. If you know them well - you will be useful. I was mostly working with marketing platforms and website management and had to learn a lot of things from scratch. If you learn quickly and adjust, you’ll most likely do well in startups.
Ok, now I understand what I like to do and where I want to move further, but my internship is over. After I finished my internship, I didn’t want to stop working. I started to look for a job right away and my former boss gave me a good reference and recommended a travel startup in Munich - Fineway. I started as a working student in Marketing, but later on, I transferred to data science. Short side note, I started learning Python in Berlin and this was a very good call because it opened up to me the opportunity to switch to data science and ditch Excel for good.
Meanwhile, I was helping out my brother and his wife with their projects and my experience from work really changed a lot in our family business.
Chapter 3: I know what I’m doing and why and kind of understand how to get there
Currently, I am finishing up my business administration degree and plan to stay in Germany and work here for a couple more years.
After you’re done with your studies and have your diploma you can apply either for a work-seeking visa or directly for working visa, if you already have the contract signed.
You have to meet the minimum salary requirement, which is lower for tech and scientific workers, than for business people, but it’s pretty doable considering the German level of wages.
In the end, I came back to technical specialty, but studying business and working in marketing was a huge game-changing experience. Unless you have a business point of view, it’s very hard to understand what technologies you need to learn and why. Also, nobody said you can’t mix the two. For example, my bachelor thesis topic is: “Application of Artificial Intelligence in Entrepreneurial innovation”.
Piece of advice for people who would want to study in Germany:
Do not solely rely only on your degree
The degree is important, but it’s not everything. Unless you have good references, heavy hands-on skills, experience, and social skills, it would be very hard to find a good position based solely on your diploma.
In short, start working as soon as possible and learn a lot.
Choose a program with a mandatory internship
I believe that the internship was the most important part of my studies. It allowed me to understand how real business works, meet really cool people. My opinion is that you can learn this lesson either the hard way or just take what I say. I honestly can not picture how someone would be able to find work without internship experience.
Programming skills are like language skills
Programming or other technical skills would be useful almost anywhere in the future. My approach was close to the one that Linus Torvalds had. Just code something that would be useful for you. Start with small simple stuff, like building a command in bash that would open links for news and tell you the weather, then make more complex stuff.
The diploma is a must if you want to work in Germany, but additional skills like languages and tech expertise would make it easy for you to find a job. To be honest, you don’t even need instructors for this. I recently went to language school and placement test distinguished that my level is B2.2 even though I only learned German with a book that I bought and Netflix. The same goes for programming, I mostly read O’Reilly books and looked up programming tutorials on the web. Yep, that might be hard if you are not used to it, but nobody said that it’s supposed to be simple.
Read a lot!
The reading really changed everything for me. It was a real shift in the way I see everything after I realized that there is a ton of books on the issues, that I really need to know about. There are good books on almost any topic: psychology, management, marketing, finance, personal life, managing emotions, and programming. You’d be surprised. I don’t read fiction books as much at the moment(max. 2-3 per year), but non-fiction literature can get you very far.
You can do a lot. It takes luck and skill, but the initiative is very important. Just try stuff
Your personal experience, skills, and interests are significant, no matter how inapplicable they may seem to you. Just try yourself in anything that interests you. It may take a while to figure out what is genuinely interesting for you. For example, it took me 3 musical instruments and 8 years of studying in musical school to understand that I don’t like making music. However, it doesn’t mean that it was useless. The music industry is vastly ignored and overlooked and there is a lot of interesting stuff that you can do there - take Spotify.
You can be into movies, sports, computer games, watches, parties or whatever. Business education would help you to understand how you may make money out of it. And if you don’t know what you’re interested in, business education may eventually help you find this out.
