Our meeting with the graduates of 2014
On Monday, 5 January 2015, we met our former schoolmates to listen to their reports about university life a year after they had left school. While they were taking their seats, Ms. Pokorná was still bustling about offering homemade strudel to everyone, for which she had spent the entire afternoon in the kitchen. Finally, the meeting could begin and our former twelfth-graders, one after another, told us about their joys and sorrows of everyday life in their new environment.
It seemed like they were mostly happy with their choice of study courses. What surprised us was the fact that the daily life of a university student still provides enough time for leisure activities. While some are able to travel around or to go to the gym, others, in Berlin for example, have to think twice before they spend money. As far as the roof over their heads is concerned, some seem to have found the perfect place.
The majority feel well integrated into the German university community and take advantage of the training they had received at our school here in Pirna. Being prospective students ourselves we were given some handy tips. These mainly concerned a timely apartment-hunting, a good academic performance and extracurricular social interaction. Under no circumstances should we underestimate the importance of the German language or Ms Pokorná’s advice, which had often made life easier for them in the past.
We were happy to welcome our former schoolmates after such a long time and hope to manage our prospective lives at university just like they did, so that we will be able to share our own experiences and have a piece of strudel again next year.
Sára Dočekalová, 12th grade, Patrick Demus, 12th grade