Alumni Blog
The Alumni Blog Initiative
The Alumni Blog is an initiative of the Alumni Association. The blog thrives through our bloggers, all of which are alumni of Jacobs University Bremen. We hope to enrich our readers’ daily experience with valuable insights from our personal as well as professional lives, ranging from intercultural encounters to management techniques and more. We hope you can learn from us and we from you. Despite being a very young project, a great amount of readers have been attracted to our blog posts so far. We hope to continue being an enriching endeavour and welcome you to contact us via Suna Turhan.
Alumni in focus - Tanja Deisler - Serious Business Collection
Alumna Tanja Deisler writes about her new Kickstarter campaign "Serious Business Collection". […]
A Tale of Migrant Love
She was born in Pakistan. He wailed his first cry in Bangladesh. They both grew up traveling a fair amount. She travelled to Europe and North America on family vacations. He explored Eastern Asia with his parents on his father’s business trips. […]
Running towards happiness – how I became a marathon runner
It is roughly over 10 years since I started running – or at least something close to running. Initially it was all about losing weight. So I started for 5-10 minutes at a time. Before I would run with my brother for about 30 minutes, but would feel like about to die afterwards. […]
And Then There Was Trump
Friday November 9th 2016, we all found out for sure Donald Trump is our President. Now please take a moment and let that sink in: Donald Trump is our President. As an American citizen, I […]
Flower Power
“I've got the power!”, that song by Snap is one of the first things that ironically come to my mind when I hear the word “power”. Yes, this will be about power. Where exactly this article will take us I do not know yet. Frankly, I have not yet decided which messages I want to convey. The main reason for this is: Defining power and its implications does not come naturally to me. […]
Angry – Losing my Religion (Part 2)
Recently, I got the chance to have an in-depth conversation about the “refugee crisis”. I liked the people I spoke to. Hardworking, well-educated and well-travelled. We touched base on a variety of topics before finally landing on the topic most Europeans are talking about at least once a week, in one form or the other. […]
Losing my Religion (Part 1)
This post took me an inordinately long time to start. I went through all the usual tropes of starting an essay; the anecdote, the definition of a word that’s relevant to the topic; the click-bait-y statement. But at the end of the day there’s no easy way to say what I want to and I apologise in advance for the possible incoherence of this post. […]
Where Minority is the Majority
That was it. I finally knew what to call it. I knew what I had been missing for the previous six years. I was hearing this phrase in 2011 at the Berkeley faculty club during a speech by Charles Hsu (a Jacobs University Foundation board member) to Jacobs Alumni that had gathered from around North America. […]
Ways to Deal with Loss
If you don’t know the feeling I have experienced so many times recently, I want to congratulate you. From the bottom of my heart I wish you that it will take many many more years until you experience that feeling. The feeling that makes your throat tie up, your muscles lose tension and your eyes watery. The feeling of loss of a loved one. […]
How I Met My Cousin
I have a close friend who is a US migrant. One of our favourite pastimes is to argue over the superiority of Europe to North America and vice versa. We dig up articles, send each other reports and news articles and butt heads – sometimes literally – over opinions. […]
Getting Footloose
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dance, and I can’t imagine a future where I don’t. Even as I write all that you read I am listening to music and dancing in my seat. When I listen to any sort of music, I find myself physically unable to stay still. […]
Ignoring is Bliss
An essential technique in time management is one which people like you and me risk being scolded for: ignoring. A few weeks ago, I read a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review on how “The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore” by Ed Batista. […]
A Stranger in the Mirror
It is ironic that a nation which started a movement for Urdu that led to the creation of a new sovereign state would have a separate ethnic group called “Urdu Speaking People”. These are the people known for migrating to Pakistan, from Urdu speaking regions of India. […]
Five Seconds of Courage
Many things can have an impact that will change your life forever. It could be a friend, a TED talk or a random kid you meet on the street. Those situations of impact may vary greatly in length. However, what I have learned recently is that it generally takes just five seconds of courage to change your life. […]
Think Diversity Big – Why the Humanities and Multidisciplinarity Matter
At times, I am frustrated with my job search. No, not true. I am really good at researching job openings and interesting companies. Also, I am getting better and better at selling myself – I mean selling my skills and talents and various qualifications and bla. The job search is not what I am frustrated with. […]
Neil D’souza’s thoughts on Charlie Hebdo and the Terrorists – This is not about Freedom of Expression
There is no absolute freedom of expression – anywhere in the world. There are generally content and conduct exceptions that make this freedom practical for civil society. […]
Miss Congeniality
The day had been particularly long. The commute to work had taken two hours in the interminable Shenzhen traffic; in the office, one problem after the other kept me occupied- payments were delayed, machines were broken, products were failing quality tests. […]
History of the Munich Alumni Local Chapter
I moved to Munich in 2005, the same year I graduated from Jacobs (it was still IUB at that time). As far as I recall, I was one of two alumni in the city back then. I had my reservations at first about that strange Bavarian capital at the other end of Germany. […]
Ghosts that Haunt Me
Moving is hard. You leave behind all you know and are comfortable with, all the people who know your quirks and your history, your favourite coffee place!, and all of this can quickly escalate into a spiral of depression and panic. […]
Finding Your Career Path – For Now
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life is no cakewalk. It is that big question that seems to plague us throughout and especially after college. […]
Heart Jet Lag
When I started at Jacobs in the fall of 2010, our then President, Joachim Treusch, said a few words in his welcome address that stuck with me throughout my entire time as a student there. […]