Transcription
[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 quote 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 invest in science and higher education, that 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, and 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 Ages, 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, 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 are 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 these 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, automated, 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 leave 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, they're 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 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, the group leader did not participate in the construction process. He just said, "You do this, this, this." This is what happened on the French side. Can you imagine what happened 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 sad to say about the French one, and but what does it say? It says, you know, we're 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. SAP, 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 on the 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 they said, "Well, it's great, wonderful." And they were used 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 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, 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 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.
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