Career prospects: Thoughts of a Master's student at the end of his studies

I wish I'd just studied something proper. Business studies or at least a teaching degree. At some point in six semesters, most Bachelor's students of German Studies will probably have this thought or something similar running through their heads. And anyway. What do you actually do with German studies? Drive a cab? Another phrase that will come up in six semesters. But yes - what the hell do you actually do with German Studies? What did I actually study? As a rule, not German studies. And not medieval studies, linguistics or literary studies either. Because sooner or later in your studies it happens: you find a subject that interests you more than other things and for some reason, perhaps for that very reason, you are better at it than the girl with the blue hair who already knew so much in her first semester. Or than Mark, the guy you live with, who started studying German before you did. And at some point you get the impression that you know more about your subject than the professor who only gave you 13 points on your term paper. Somehow, you think he didn't really engage with your work. But it's a big world out there and there are people, companies, NGOs, authorities or who knows who are interested in your ideas. Ask for an internship. You've learned how to think scientifically, how to understand and apply complex issues, and if you can't do something, you've learned how to teach yourself. These are things that cannot be taken for granted. You will have completed a course of study that you may not have been 100% sure you could do before. Some of this feeling will remain and that's okay, because a new adventure is beginning.

And then you simply fire up Google and see what jobs are available in the field of your interests. Sure, if you want to be a journalist, you could have studied journalism. If you think social media is cool, you could have studied communication design. And if you wanted to become a management consultant, you could have studied business administration. But you didn't. And you don't have to. It's not about what you studied, but how you can enrich a team in the future. Linguists work together with computer scientists to optimize computer-human interfaces such as user interfaces, translation programs or language computers. Literary scholars become editors for television or newspapers or write their debut novel. Medievalists research corporate histories, curate museums, etc. Maybe your idea is so good that you go into research, found a company or start a YouTube channel. You might still have to learn how to raise third-party funding, draw up a balance sheet or edit a video, but if you keep at it, you'll manage somehow. You'll also have understood what post-structuralism is.

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