My Classmates

I study with a great group of people in the renewable energy master's program. We're very diverse mixture of cultures, languages, backgrounds, personalities, experiences, etc., but we get along really well together. We're composed of 31 students from 20 different countries -- Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, England, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, and the U.S. Around half of us are mechanical engineers, and the other half are electrical engineers, material scientists, physicists, environmental scientists, or combinations of these specialties. 15 of us are in the EUREC program, which means that we'll move to a different university for the second semester (location depends upon our chosen area of specialization). The other 16 of our classmates are enrolled in a program called PPRE, which entirely takes place at the University of Oldenburg.




All of the students in the two programs are fluent English speakers, but only a few have significant German language skills (and I don't yet count myself as one of these). Since all of our classes are taught in English, and we nearly always speak English to each other as the only common language... it's sometimes easy to forget that I'm living in a non-English-speaking country. I'm planning to sign up for a language exchange program called Sprachtandem soon, which pairs up native German-speakers with international students to exchange language skills. It would be a real shame for me to have lived in Germany for 4+ months without picking up any appreciable German language skills...