After almost four weeks and countless company visits within the DHBW summer program in the castle, the international students today had the opportunity to briefly introduce themselves within a speed dating at the companies.
The head of the DHBW project, Stefan Riedl, organized the annual Speeddating in the castle in Bad Mergentheim. The very excited students were in a familiar environment to have individual conversations with various company representatives. At the beginning, the students introduced themselves, followed by the company representatives, and off they went. Everyone had the opportunity to express their wishes as to which companies they would like to contact. This resulted in 13 conversations. This is a very good quota out of a total of 20 summer students in the castle.
The interviews usually lasted ten minutes, during which the applicants had the opportunity to ask specific questions in order to learn more about the profession and the companies. The trainers, such as Christian and Kerstin, also had the opportunity to get to know the students better. It is important to find out whether the young people would like to study in Germany, whether they can imagine a life far away from home without parents at the age of 18, or why they chose this course of study. Because it is important to address everything openly, only so a decision for a study far away from home for the next three to four years possible.
A total of eight companies took this unique opportunity to interview international applicants and recruit new students for the year 2020. On the same evening, the TecAlliance gave the applicants feedback on how the interviews had gone and what the decision had been. This process is a characteristic to which the company attaches importance – because with openness and quick feedback, the international students can travel back on Friday and report to their families at home a lot about the past four weeks in Germany.
Now we hope that the applicants who have received an offer from us will choose us and a DHBW course of study. But the students should discuss this with their parents at home. If they give us positive feedback, they will receive their training contract with Swiss Post within the next week.
With the Summer in the Palace program, we have already won eight students from five countries over the past few years. We are thus expanding our “otherwise so German” trainee team with many international influences, such as new cultures, many different languages, different know-how and many little things that enrich the team.
