Deutsche Bürokratie
I’m expecting this to be a relatively short post this week. This is not to say that I haven’t done anything this week (quite the opposite in fact), however I wouldn’t wish to bore you with an entire retelling of a week’s worth of enrolment, administration and general German Bürokratie.
Next week is the first week of teaching here at the HU which means that the last couple of weeks have been all about enrolment – though with our Intensives Programm still on last week we only got involved this week. My main task (apart from generally helping out with organisation etc etc) was to do campus tours for the new Incoming international students.
This may sound like a relatively simple task however, when you remember that I’ve only been here a couple of months (not very long in the grand scheme of things) AND that I would have to be speaking comprehensible German in front of a large group of students…needless to say I was slightly nervous. Fortunately I had another studentische Mitarbeiterin to help me out.
On the first day everything actually ended up going quite smoothly. The group was relatively small and my colleague was able to fill in any gaps I had in my explanations! There were also some Russian students in amongst the group so I was able to practise my rusty russkii yazyk…or at least that was the plan.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, I could do with some more practice! Hopefully this should be possible again now – during the IP I just didn’t have the time. It wasn’t all terrible, though, as I was told that what little, garbled Russian I was able to say was done with a very convincing Siberian accent – I’m figuring I’ll fit right in in Tyumen’ then.
After the relative calm of day one, day two was a different story entirely – about three or four times as many students turned up as on the previous day. Despite this, things were running a lot quicker and more smoothly than the day before. A good thing you might think – not so. What this in fact meant, for me at least, was that the students were ready for the first campus tour of the day a full 45 minutes earlier than expected meaning that the girl who was meant to be helping me wouldn’t be turning up for another 45 minutes.
It seemed typical, of course, that this first group was the largest of the week by far – about 35-40 international students, I reckon. But, I persevered and set off with my huge group (on my own!) to lead them round campus and hopefully not get lost. And you know what? It actually went quite. I was able to do everything in relatively fluent (well, in my opinion at least) German – even if there were a few mistakes here and there – and nobody looked lost or like they didn’t have a clue what was going on. All in all a success and the later tours went even better thanks to smaller group sizes and my native German helper.
So that was pretty much my week. I don’t have any pictures relating to this week specifically but here’s a random picture anyway – just to brighten this post up a bit and make you all jealous, ha ha!
It may be getting colder but if the sky stays like this who cares?
Bis später!