An ausländer gets a Working Student job!

I moved to Offenburg, Germany in December ‘20. Why?

Emphasis on the question mark.

After spending 23 years in 3 different cities in India, some very infamous words that I heard quite often were “He/She is planning to go to the US”, “You remember that girl? She’s in Europe/US now! Wow!”, “The plan is: Bachelors from India, Post-grad from somewhere foreign”. I can quite confidently say that I’m not the only one who has heard something similar living in India. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against pursuing a post-grad outside India. In fact, I’d be a hypocrite if I had something against this and to be honest, I’m absolutely enjoying living in Germany for almost 2 years now. What I really can’t comprehend is.. did we ever decide to question this concept? Well, that’s for another day.

After completing my first semester at the University of Applied Sciences Offenburg, it was about time to look for a working student(werkstudent) job.

Why after the first semester? Why not right after landing in Germany? Is it necessary to work as a student?

There’s no right answer to these questions but I’ve always believed that to achieve something, you need to have a roadmap. This “road” of the roadmap might not be the most efficient one but well it’s super difficult to have that hindsight. For me, these questions always had an answer.

A semester for me was an adequate time to get to know a place, make friends, construct a schedule, and mentally adjust to a new country. I had enough time to understand what other students were doing at the university apart from their studies. Enough time to figure out what they were doing right and more importantly, what they were doing wrong. I saw my seniors working part-time in various places. Some were working part-time with a professor at the university, some were working with a start-up (more exposure.. right?), a few of them were working with established companies and others were working with eating joints like McDonald’s or KFC.

It isn’t necessary to work part-time to complete your university course and get your master's degree, however, there are many benefits to doing so. Here are a few that ended up being strong deciding factors.

1. Work Experience. Making the CV stronger. You gain new skills. A deeper understanding of what “road” you want to take in the next 5-10 years. On top of that, I live in a country where I’m not a native speaker of their language. While I’m making this language skill better, I need to up my game when it comes to technical skills to compensate for this language barrier.

2. Finances. While working a part-time job you can earn enough money to at least pay your rent every month. For me, this particular benefit, although important, is the least important of all being a student.

3. Culture Understanding. It’s a new country! The people are different, festivals are different, the language is different, and values are different. Working in an office environment exposes you to all these differences. You will constantly be comparing your new office to the one where you have worked back in your home country for a while, but eventually, you’ll start understanding the answer to all your “what’s” and “why’s”. Moreover, it’s fun to get to know more people from a different environment which would in the long run help boost your individuality.

After my first semester, I decided I want to work in either an established company or a start-up.

The goal was to become an industry-ready person with my interests sorted even further after I finish my 6 month-long part-time job.

After applying in over 20 companies and getting rejected by about 18 of them (in their defense, why would they hire a student with no experience in Germany over someone else who can at least speak their native language and possesses a fraction of my skill?), I started improving my skills during my summer break by taking up courses on Coursera while applying for more jobs. I always had an interest in the Internet of Things (IoT). In the past, I had done courses and internships on the same topic but I was never exposed to the cloud side of it. I decided to pursue a course titled “Google Cloud Platform in IoT”. I had decided that there was no point in sitting back and reading rejections every day, might as well deviate from the “road” a little. After about a month, I received a few interview calls and I finally had an interview in August ‘21 with a company named RUAG Aerostructures in Bavaria. Everything was great, it seemed too good to be true. After getting so many rejections, I was accustomed! This served as an ultimate confidence booster.

On October 1st, 2022, I moved to Munich, Germany. I started working at RUAG Aerostructures.

I was working in the Innovation and Technology department which dealt with a lot of IoT and Data Analytics. I worked on a few projects there and improved my skills but more importantly, I gained new skills. I worked on GUI development and Data Prediction models. For the first time, I combined Python with MQTT. This was not the first time I used a programming language with a communication protocol but this was different and that’s what was interesting!

When you observe differences, you attain a sense of comparison.

Working in the aerospace industry! Living in Munich! Doing exactly what I want!

Sounds exciting and fulfilling right?

A lot of it looked great at the start but comprehending the cons takes some time. I was working for 20 hours every week at RUAG and on the other days I had my online(thanks, COVID!) university lectures, assignments, and upcoming exams. It slowly became super hectic. The weekend getaways near Munich did make it all a lot better.

(Salzburg, Austria)

At the end of these 6 months, I was able to complete my aim. I was technically way stronger than I was 6 months ago. I gained more confidence in myself as an individual for my next chapter. I was ready to begin the end of my post-grad, writing a master-thesis!