Scotland, England, Russia and money
In one hour I am on the way to Scotland and England – first a visit to St. Andrews, then traveling around the Highlands, flying to Luton, visit to Cambridge and LSE. I need to visit the universities because I want to make a final decision for my studies (see previous articles here and here).
Harvard will be difficult to finance. I am glad that there are companies like the Career Concept AG with their “Bildungsfonds” – a loan that is paid back as a percentage of the income. The Bildungsfond would cover a part of the loans, but still there is a gap for the financing.
My efforts in getting a normal credit from a German Bank were disappointing. Without property or any other securities, German Banks do not want to give a loan for studies. Apparently, it does not matter that the four universities from which I received an offer belong to the best universities worldwide. American Banks are more flexible, the Citibank offers study loans up to 20.000 US-D for Harvard students, but they also need an American co-signer for giving a loan.
Contacting German companies was also quite disheartening. Most companies have their own internal career system. Even when I offered to write my Master thesis in a field of their choice relating to the Russian situation, their response was not very enthusiastic.
I have no problem that companies relying heavily on natural science prefer to support students from these studies or establish direct connections with the faculties in the field of natural sciences from going universities. But should this result in completely ignoring anybody coming out of the field of social sciences?
I studied social sciences like Philosophy, Economics and Sociology, but I always had very good grades in Chemistry, Physics or Computer Science in high school. The tragedy of the German school system that in 10th grade, I was forced to drop either Computer Science, Physics or Chemistry – even though I had excellent grades in all these classes.
I would be willing to co-operate closely with companies that are working in Russia and have an interest to understand the complex political and economical movements taking place in Russia. The German newspaper Handelsblatt featured an article on Tuesday on how Russian investors are becoming a strong force in almost all industries.
With the money from Gas and Oil trade the Russian government is already thinking of itself as a new superpower and behaves like it as well. I personally think that in the next 20 years there will be more international political crises in the East-West relations between Russian and Europe then between Europe and China or Europe and the Middle East. Therefore for all companies working there, the need for experts in this field is big – but at the moment it seems that this insight has not triggered down to the Human Ressource department. But I’ll keep my hopes up, sometimes help comes from unexpected directions.
Februar 25th, 2009 at 23:58
Your positive thinking about unexpected job offers resemble to my story going to Russia to work as a software developer years ago. I think if you run for opportunities which suit to your character, it is possible to reach success. A matter of statistics and probabilities. So, keep trying
Russia is by the way full of hot money, but a few lucky oligarchs sit on most of this treasure. I have no degree on economics or business etc, just an opinion on what I see in Moscow