My Story
The first time I went abroad was back in High School when I went to North Delta just south of Vancouver for a year. That’s when I started playing Lacrosse and Snowboarding, generally tried many new things and first ignited my passion for longer and more meaningful travels.
From Cologne, where I went to school in Germany, I moved to Aachen to study Mineral Resources Engineering. During the Bachelor’s degree I decided to go on a semester abroad in Brisbane, Australia, where I started organizing smaller trips - first with and then also for friends. An important reason to go to Australia was to experience the sophisticated mining industry in an internship, though. Subsequent to the semester, I worked for 3 months in a 2 weeks on/ 1 week off FIFO (Fly-In Fly-Out) schedule.
Coming back to Germany, I still finished my Bachelor’s degree in the regular period of studies with a very good final score. Working hard for this achievement left little time for other interests besides Lacrosse and some cooking. Therefore, I decided that I want to use my Master’s degree to focus more on learning practical things for life rather than studying for exams. Going to 2 courses of the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) both showed me skills I wasn’t aware of this far and sparked my fire for developing students including myself. Meanwhile, I seized the singular opportunity to organize an academic excursion to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for the institute I was working at.
The next step was going to Trondheim, Norway, to study a full year with the Erasmus+ program. With the idea in mind to properly integrate into Norwegian culture, I joined the student society “Studentersamfundet” where I volunteered as a waiter and bartender in the student-run restaurant “Lyche”. Besides quickly improving my Norwegian, this opportunity allowed me to get valuable insights into a huge student-run organization. Additionally, I volunteered as a cook at “UKA”, the largest and also student-run festival in Norway and spend some time with other charitable projects. As I love to cook and socialize with delicious meals, one of my favorite things is bringing people together with food - partly in form of running dinners as “rudirockt” (which I took to Trondheim) or even better: team-internally e.g. Lax Rocks. Especially due to the human and experience-focused projects, I started to appreciate the natural and very direct rewarding system of making somebody straightforward “happy with my work”, which is unfortunately not so easy to encounter in many modern jobs.
When I have the time and energy, I also like going for the very difficult or sometimes even called “impossible” ideas. Maybe they are just referred to in this way because they do not seem feasible with a common approach. One of these challenges I am proud of, is giving the participants of a cultural exchange and motivational weekend from BEST Aachen the best food they have ever experienced at such a event. To achieve this, I applied my previously gained knowledge from UKA and went for some in this local group unprecedented food sponsoring. Another of these challenges was the demanding organization of the excursion in Central Asia where I had to use all the means I could get ahold of.
The highly productive and rewarding time in Norway gave me the confidence to look for an opportunity in order to improve my Spanish and experience life in Latin America. Working in small scale sand and gravel mining in Colombia and trying to establish a clean production of gold as a byproduct was the hardest challenge I have faced so far in my life and made me well aware of the struggles most other people in this world face on a day to day basis. Moreover, I noticed that I do not have the skills yet to convince C-Levels of my recommendations - in this case a more sustainable production. Subsequently, I also used my travel time to work on my photography and writing skills, as well as reflecting upon the modern travel culture.
Back when I started this blog, I decided to work in management consulting at BCG in Germany so as to develop key skills, understand our economy, meet and work with inspiring people and hopefully leverage my impact - at least until I find a fitting opportunity in which I can use my unique skillset in order to make a positive and sustainable impact in this world. After learning a lot there, I learned how to build up a Food Start-Up across all company divisions as the first full-time employee. I'm currently still pushing fair chocolate with JOKOLADE and building up the company as COO with my work focus on managing the supply chain and processes. My personal motivation there is driven by maximizing the impact we can have to improve the cocoa farmers' lives in West Africa.
I will always continue searching for the perfect niche where I can best use my unique background and skillset in order to maximize my impact and make our world a better place to live in. These opportunities could be, but are not limited to:
Implementing innovative solutions for a more sustainable food industry
Implementing ecologically and socially sustainable projects in the mineral resource and recycling industries
Proactive realization of innovative solutions and impact levers as social entrepreneurship or in the non profit sector
Evaluating and implementing operations optimizations, in order to make companies ecologically and economically more sustainable or to enable innovative projects and their scalability
Evaluating and implementing impact levers for a more sustainable development of organizations and societies
In the end, we need many skilled and especially motivated people to work efficiently together globally to effectively tackle the mutual challenges of humanity for a better future society and I work hard to become one of them.