Julie Küpperfahrenberg

"I knew that I wanted to do a master at a university abroad. In my opinion, it contributes a lot to your personal and professional development when you place yourself outside your familiar context. As I had only vague ideas in which direction I wanted to go with my professional background (every history student is more than familiar with utterances such as ‘History? Oh! That’s interesting! But what are you going to do with this later?’), I gathered information about master degrees at manifold European universities. I had come to the conclusion that I did not want to commit myself to the mere study of events, processes and developments of the past, so no art for art’s sake, but that I wanted to draw lessons from the past in order to improve the future. In this respect I was really exited when I came across the master program ‘History of Society: Global History and International Relations’ offered by Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Here, for the first time, I had the feeling that my knowledge about history could in some way be transformed into actual contributions to solve political problems and crises. Thus I applied at Erasmus University Rotterdam and I got admitted.

Although I was also approved at other universities, when I received my admission for Rotterdam, I did not shed a thought about going somewhere else. Firstly, Erasmus University is highly regarded in Europe. Secondly, the program itself exactly met my interests and my professional background. Thirdly, although I had only been in Rotterdam once before, I remembered it to be an open-minded, multi-cultural city with a very special charm that makes it so different from other cities in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. I like the fact that Rotterdam is not one of the well-known touristic cities such as Amsterdam or Brussels, where everybody had already been - Rotterdam is in this way my city. The program fully meets my expectations. Although it is a lot of work, a lot to read and to write, I can clearly see the developments that I have made in the last six month, not only professionally or scientifically, but also and in particular personally.

When I will hold my Master degree in September, I seek to invest some time to concerns of my heart. I plan to do an internship at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. As I now approached political problems from an academic point of view, I feel that I need to add a humanitarian and practical perspective. Only then I will be equipped to find a work place, which is dedicated to solve international problems and thus to make the world a better place."