Getting a University Degree

I love learning so not going to university was never an option, even though I was the first in my family who got a university degree. At first, I wanted to study biology. I was on the "science track" at school and loved biology classes, especially micro-biology and organic chemistry. Luckily, I took a suitability test first. I failed because I was not ok with experimenting on animals. I'm still not, so dodged a bullet there!

Next I thought about psychology. I took an extracurricular class at school, read a psychology magazine and even bought a text book. The latter turned out to be a very good idea. When I tried to read the text book I realised pretty immediately that psychology was not for me. I didn't want to learn about experiments and their obvious results. I wanted to learn about people. How they behaved and why.

One morning I woke up and knew what I'd have to do. Books were about people and life. All I had to do was read. I decided to study literature and since my favourite author was (and still is) Agatha Christie, English Literature it was.

I moved to Munich, picked Comparative Literature and Sociology as my minor subjects, changed the latter a year later to French (with a focus on literature) and never looked back.

I practiced:

• English and French
• writing academic papers
• translating poetry
• analysing poems, plays and novels
• standing up for myself