Report December - Bohdan Chepkunov

Hey there! It is me again talking about the life of an international student. I did not travel anywhere this December, so I would rather tell you about my first work, expectations of it and how hard is it to get a job if you are not German.

First of all, if you are not a resident of Germany and came here only for studying you do not have to make an entire journey through the state institutions and spend days and weeks in queues trying to obtain piles of papers. Basically, all you need is in Germany is only one document: personal tax number, so called “Steuer-ID”. And the most wonderful thing is that you can get it in five minutes at the local city hall. After that you are thought to be a legal tax payer, so you can work wherever you want. The other thing is to find a job. “Where and how?” – would you ask. That is easy! In Germany it is normal to work somewhere during the study, so to begin with you can ask your study advisor or a tutor if there are any free vacancies for students at a campus. It may be so that you will be allowed to help somebody with a paperwork and so on. If there are no free vacancies and you was already kept ahead, the next step is to walk around the city looking for some advertisements and the doors of cafes and bakeries. It is an ordinary practice for employers to attract students, because normally all students work for a minimal salary in an amount of 450 Euro, which is way lower than a salary of a grown-up employee who has already finished his education. Yes, you do really need the basic language knowledge to keep up a conversation and to understand what your employer wants from you.

By my own experience I can state that B1 level of German is quite enough to get a job. And the third step if the first two attempts were unlucky is to look for a job on eBay site. Hundreds of people every day post their advertisements over there: you will certainly find a workplace of your dream that suits your wishes, rhythms and study schedule. You can even post your own advert! A lot of students are worried that it is hard to find a job in Germany, but I disagree with them. If you want to find a job, you will find it. Everything needed is a wish and a piece of insistence.

As for me, I started working from the second month of living in Schweinfurt. My first job was cleaning of supermarkets at nights. It was a great opportunity to get some money without interrupting my study. Of course, it was a hard work and not for “white collars”, but money does not grow on trees you know. After some time, I realized that the season job also exists, so that I tried to find something for Christmas time. You cannot even imagine how surprised was I when I saw how many people are wanted for work on a Christmas market! That is how I became a waffle-baker. The work was interesting and educational, because I had to work with Germans and speak to customers, so my language skills raised the moon, though I had only B1 level when I came there.

All in all, I would say that the search of a job should be the last thing to think about for a student due to a reason that it is easy to find and even easier to change.