Starting My Third Year A Little Differently

Before summer started, I was describing my planned student exchange and my bachelor’s thesis, which was approaching at the speed of lightning. Yup – summer vacation is now over and my thesis already has a topic, a title, and a basic structure, and now it’s just waiting for me to really get into it.

At the moment I’m about 600 kilometers from my university, in a little town with a great significance for Czech history. Here’s a short quiz: Where did John Huss spend the last day of his life, July 6, 1415? That’s right, Kostnice! And here’s some geography for you: This town isn’t located, surprisingly enough, in the Czech Republic. It can be found next to the Bodam Lake, in the southernmost part of Germany, literally on the border with Switzerland, and it is called Konstanz. So the first semester of the last year of my bachelor’s program started here. Even though my adaptation to the environment hasn’t really gone smoothly, despite the gorgeous nature there, I have decided to share my story with you and everyone who happens to be reading this blog post.

In the two years that I have been renting an apartment on my own, I’ve created my own small safe space. I was thinking that returning to the dormitories couldn’t be that awful. I was thinking about the Open Gate dorms – they were cozy, clean, pleasing to the eye, and spacious. With my high school studies in mind, I was introduced to my current room, No. 004, and my illusions were obliterated by the reality of German dormitories. When a student who worked for the dormitories first introduced me to my room, I awkwardly watched every step of his very “thorough” guided tour. He came up to a cabinet and behind it was about 10 cm of wire sticking out of the wall. His observation was: “Well, there is no router for the Wi-Fi but there’s an electronics store right around the corner.” I simply turned around and looked the other way. I looked at the 140 cm wide bed and was just unable to imagine how I would fit in there with my boyfriend, who is six foot five. Hoping that perhaps something could be done about that, I told the overalls-clad student that the bed was quite small for both me and my boyfriend. His answer silenced me for the rest of the tour. “Some say small, others say cozy,” he replied quite promptly, with a smile on his face, absolutely unperturbed. And so I gave up, took a deep breath, and told myself that I would pull through. Instead of despairing, I made a list of cleaning supplies, etc., in my head that I would need to make the tiny apartment inhabitable.

The start of the school year and lectures brought new surprises. I learned that Konstanz University focused on research (which I had known) and that this type of “scientific” attitude was expected even from bachelor’s students (which I hadn’t really known). When I found out that what “scientific approach” meant for the Political Science and Public Administration program was no essays but term papers—basically shorter bachelor’s theses, ten to fifteen pages long (using 1.15 line spacing)—I still hoped it was a joke. In these term papers, we are not supposed to argue for a specific view, but instead we have to test a hypothesis using acquired data. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to avoid statistics here. I thought the situation was manageable with the basic knowledge of statistics I had from Open Gate. But my expectations were wrong once again, and my face turned white when my professors started to expect me to know how the Expected Utility Hypothesis works, along with Linear Regression and other functions that are way too difficult for me. In other words, Konstanz University completely destroyed my erroneous assumption that having chosen a field in the humanities would allow me to avoid mathematics and my illogical thinking, among others.

Despite these tribulations, I’m happy for Konstanz University because I believe that after my stay here ends in February I’ll be able to breeze through the methodological side of my thesis without any problems. So despite having to challenge my comfort zone and my brain cells, there are benefits too. Obviously, in addition to the school, I have had the chance to meet many amazing people from all around the world, including some interesting international professors. For instance, Dr. Alan Whiteside OBE, an HIV/AIDS researcher whose lectures were absolutely impressive and enriching, hosted the Global Health Challenges course. I have also had the unique opportunity to meet – and one day perhaps even join – some students from Leo Club, an international volunteer organization that helps its community and people who would like to join the community. I definitely do not regret my decision to leave for one semester, and I hope that thanks to the Erasmus+ program I will be able to step outside my comfort zone some more and to make my list of friends even longer.

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