About my experience at University
by Francisca Fechser Arriaga
My name is Francisca and I was born and raised in Buenos Ares, Argentina, where I went to the Waldorf school “San Miguel Arcangel”.
I’ve been living in Germany since February 2021 where I volunteered for 1 and a half years at a Waldorf school. There I learned German and worked a lot. During my time there, I became friends with the art teacher who had studied at the “Ottersberg Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen” (College Ottersberg for Social Art). She recommended it to me and I started studying "Social Work" there in the autumn of 2023.
For the bachelor's degree, they offer a series of directions in which one can focus the study. The options were either art or dance and theatre. The specialization in dance and theatre is mostly pedagogical. I believe it is a great match to combine social work with theatre! It provides the study with a good balance between theory and practice, it's like mixing two studies together. I have “mask work” as a subject in theatre and meanwhile, I take “children and family rights in the context of the social work”. When studying in this way, one can get a deep understanding of social work (in this case, focused in Germany) as well as practical solutions to work in the field.
There are also some “fundamental modules” that are mandatory and that give us the chance to meet students from other studies and choose courses that would normally be exclusively for other careers such as medicine, or sociology courses. It is a very interesting methodology they offer with the mix-and-match way of building your training.
How do we want to come together?
I started studying a year ago, and since then we haven’t had a space where all students come together and discuss/share their experiences at the University.
Some of our classes are still online. I’ve observed how this leads to students staying at home and not sharing in-person time on campus. There’s a lack of initiative and interaction among the students. This has an impact on the learning process which has become very individualistic, making the concept of a university as a place where young people can come together with a common goal unreal.
In the students’ committee, we are trying to work together with the professors in order to find ways to bring the students together as well as to understand why this is happening and what it is that they look for at university.
Is it only a place where people go because they want to get a degree? Are they looking for other like-minded people? Do they know what they would like to get from their time in the university besides learning? What are their expectations?
These are some of the questions we will be working on throughout the year.