[Music] my name is Alex and I would like to share some of my experiences with you some information and what you've learned about my my curriculum I mean a lot of you know numbers dates places where I've been working but I think the most important thing is what's behind it what does it do to you and so I would like to talk about higher education and about what higher education can do to you how you can participate and how it opens the door maybe to a different future now if you usually talk about higher education
about learning as you can see on the slide we think about university degree and what a university degree can do to you now for the most part people still go to university because they want to have a better life with the university degree they can belong to a middle class upper class or elite and they can have economic stability but I think we have to add more value to higher education itself let me quote something that Barack Obama said one of the u.s. presidents that actually took a lot of support for higher education and he
said in 2009 and this Couric characterizes really his like whole presidency in a speech to the National Academy of Science he said there are those people who say we cannot afford to invent in science and higher education that people support for research is somehow luxury I Barack Obama said completely disagree science and higher education is more essential for our prosperity our security our health our environment in our quality of life than it has ever been and I think if we look at higher education we have to go back a little bit not to the middle
age but look what we have to do is really see that higher education helps us to understand the world the world is becoming anytime more complex I don't know how you feel but if I watch the news if I read the newspapers it seems it has become really difficult to understand who are the bad guys who are the good guys because you have to see the political background everything is connected and it's really difficult and I think higher education should make us to people that can really church complex relations that make ourselves Express and also
that contribute to democracy and so on you know higher education has to fulfill the demands of a market and let me tell you this in Germany and this is not just in Germany in 2000 this is 17 years ago with the universities offered 300 university degrees 300 different degrees now it's 17,000 17,000 so the university has to react to a highly specific market now we have systematic automatic engineering we have robotics and mechatronics applied science what is that nobody understands but this is what is right and so through higher education you can really fit in
the society and I think you can contribute to make it better but that's higher education in general I would like to add something if you have a strawberry cake you can always add to whip cream to it and that makes it really good and so I think we have to add studying abroad you know some experiences that you can get when you study abroad and again the original idea of going abroad was I would like to learn another language because I need to speak a foreign language I need to do some studies abroad that are
being recognized at home to make my curriculum a little bit better but I think there's a lot more to it if I ask the question is studying abroad really beneficial you might know the question yes it is why because there's so many different aspects to it there's of course a cultural aspect I mean you are exposed in a different country to completely different culture and for me as a German and I speak here really as a German like the Spanish culture and the Mexican culture is like hey that's that's the same right but then you
know as Mexicans if you go to Spain oops that's a little bit different right so that's a different culture why do they talk this way and so I think we need to experience that cultural clash 24 hours for several weeks for several months and that's what a high school student really makes an international high school student and then there's the environmental benefit I can tell you when I was trying to open a bank account in Mexico I thought this is easy you go to the bank you come back here's your card here's the bank account
you know what that's a whole adventure I mean I decided when I retire one day I still have some years to go but when I retired today one day I will write a book and I will write this book when I retire because it's gonna have a hundred pages about opening a bank account in Mexico okay so but these little things that you experience a very important because that make you more complete your experience more complete not your academic knowledge but your human experience and this is really important you think we Germans and we are
a very organized but if you have the experience to go to Germany to bus stop okay and you want to enter the bus you're gonna miss this very organized lines that you have in Mexico in Germans like boom one crowd at the same time doesn't fit to the culture but hey it's ours and so these are things you just have to experience and then there's of course the academic experience which is also very different in Germany you have to be self responsible you have to be automatic automat evaded because why because you're not obligated to
go to class you're not you don't have a lot of homework you can do it or you can live it okay so most foreign students who come back from Germany but I'm not speaking here only about Germany okay because abroad experience is important wherever you go but when they come back to their own country their usual usually more self motivated self initiative and you learn how to talk to other people in a different language and you learn how to solve problems and you learn what one of the speakers before said to see the world through
different eyes let me give an example in MBA studies Korea this is three years ago they've made a little experiment so they just separated a group of five French students and five German students okay now you think friends France Germany their neighbors Western Europe you know they share the same border not going to be difficult it's going to be most the same they said look here's the task each group of you gets 500 little white sugar cubes the ones you have in Germany and then you have ten minutes time to build a tower and whoever
you know constructs the higher tower wins so what happened the French guys started to work immediately on the tower and they elected one leader and the group breed group leader did not participate in a construction process he just said you do this this this justice this is what happened on the French side can you imagine would happen on the German side they made a plan so for the first three minutes piece of paper and drawing and you know how do we construct this tower and in a very democratic way everybody participating okay and then at
the end well it's I know it's it's sad to say about the French one and but what does it say it says you know we neighbors but we act very differently in very different manners and so if you don't understand that you can also be successful how like and working like the other group does and if you don't learn how to de-escalate through communication things go pretty wrong and talking about wrong let me give you one more example si P that's a huge software company like Oracle they do it like software for big companies they
had a project in India and this is published Internet that's why I can tell you and it's a multi-billion dollar project and it imploded this project imploded after two years why why did it go so wrong cultural aspect now the German leaders asked the Indian employees all the time how does the project go and I said well it's great wonderful and they were use to it that you know as we are that you can criticize you can really tell the truth how things go and now the Indian employees they felt we can't tell them that
things are going so wrong until a point where it really exploded right and so this is really cultural communication or not communication and I know from my position when we do a project and you know my counterparts tell me you know we're not you know we're not in time but don't very not the no te preocupes for me it means yes I have to really start worrying about this right so so these are the values you really get when you work in a very study in a very different environment and it's really the elements of
being of the culture of the environment of the academic system of the language when you feel like a compressed mass I can express myself but like a child this is really difficult and it really completes you as a person now what does that do to you as a person to your professional profile it as I said makes it more complete and then you might have you might want to go back to your country and look for your place in the future now where is your place in the future you know where it is I don't
know I have no idea what your place in the future could be with these ability but what I know is that it really improves your profile and your chances in life to keep the door open and to enter maybe a company and let me read you from the OECD from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development they defined in 2009 some qualities they said that they will highly improve the employability of university graduates and they said this in 2009 and it's still in their yearly book okay and this is development the quality of development of
transferable skills to use your skills in the different environments critical thinking which I said before which higher education should give us we should really understand that we are critical thinkers that makes us understand the world and also different companies the way we work communication and international teamwork which you learn especially you abroad M mastering a second language and systemic thinking in different cultural fields so if you look back to what I've said what you consciously learn or unconsciously learn while you are in a very international setting then you probably agree that these qualities are probably
a part of you now okay and so this is the fact that you might want to easier find your place in the future with a big company and if people say what we all know that there are certain political tendencies right now I would say to tell people they're very easy solutions for very complex fields or even one country can go a solo way while leaving all the other countries apart I think deep in our heart we all know this is not true the world works very differently everything is interconnected internationally so bound together with
a web that you really have to see everything in context and so to conclude this you know being exposed to other cultures doing your height like your university education in a different country does not necessarily change you completely as a person but it adds up some qualities to you that you might want to be able to use later on and now the important thing is you might want to use them because they give you better access to a brighter future with different companies that's one thing but the other thing and that's at least as important
is it makes you not a better person but a person who rather accepts the opinion of other people who rather understands there are different ways to get to the same goal and to really through this can also could be a good example for other people and help them to explain a world that's becoming everyday more complex and faster moving thank you [Applause]
