I’m very good at learning things I enjoy, things that interest me, I’m self-taught when it comes to learning new things, but on the other hand I also have to force myself to learn when I think it’s something irrelevant for me. An example? E.g. the E-modulus (coefficient of elasticity) of cast iron. It is between 90 and 145 GPa, if you are interested… Not me, I know where to find this information and I am against bullemie learning, which is unfortunately the way we are forced to learn in school and uniersity nowadays. 

Never heard of bullemie learning? That means you try to pack everything possible into your head to let it out in the exam and not to know anything about the topic you learned about after the exam. In other words, learning for the sake of the exam and not because it makes sense for life.

From an early age, I was teaching computer science at school alongside my teacher. I taught my classmates Microsoft Office, programming in Basic, Pascal, Java, C/C++, website programming and various other things. From an early age, I enjoyed teaching other people. With a lot of patience and with target group-oriented approaches of explanation, it is still today one of my favourite things to do. My other favourite subjects in school were physics, especially astronomy and electrical engineering, English and Spanish as languages, mathematics and economics.Last one was more or less something I was good at but not interessted in 😉 So my teacher always said to me „You’re a lost economist“, meaning my strong favour in computer science and not economy, because I could do great in economy. 

After obtaining my general qualification for university entrance (Abitur), I started studying mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen for a diploma and a teaching degree for vocational college, as I wanted to keep both paths open. I quickly realised that mechanical engineering is very interesting, especially the development of machines, the logical disassembly of problems and putting them together again to find a solution, but what was completely uninteresting for me was thermodynamics, materials science and mechanics… Unfortunately, in the second semester, I passed the computer science for mechanical engineering exam in the top 5 and received an offer as a student assistant, which ended up in me working more than studying. As a student assistant, I helped write the script, acted as a tutor in front of the students, taught them programming, UML, etc., helped to design and check the exams and was the right hand of the research assistant for organising lectures and exams. I was very quickly the contact person for all matters for students and staff 🙂 Well organised, even in the most stressful situations, always reliable and able to go the extra mile without any problems.