From IT to ML: Why Masters in Germany Changed My Life

I’ve been at my current firm, BIT Technology Solutions just after I graduated from the Technical University of Munich in 2020. I started as a Production Engineer, and in the last few months have shifted into a Machine Learning role. It’s a far cry from when I worked at Cognizant in India, mostly doing infrastructure and support work. 

I spoke with Leap about my journey for their expert student series— Indians who had studied abroad recently and gotten a job— because I want to help others wanting to take the same career jump that I made.

The following is from our interview and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

1. How did I get here?

I completed my bachelor's from West Bengal University of Technology in 2016 and then worked for a very short time for Cognizant. I was doing mostly infrastructure support, IT kind of stuff but I had studied electronics and communication so it was far far off from what I wanted to do with my life. So I decided to change that.

2. A decision that changed my life

I started researching and there were two, or three options. There was the U.S. as everyone knows, then Australia and New Zealand. But they were expensive for someone from a middle-class family like mine so I focussed on Europe, as around that time, education in institutes of the TU9 universities, like Munich, Berlin, Dresden, and six universities, was pretty much free. You only have to pay a small developmental fee. 

The TU9 are their IITs. I applied to two or three TU universities and fortunately, I got accepted at Technical University Munich. I decided that I’d be stupid to throw away that opportunity so I took it and moved to Munich in 2017, to study Master of Science in communications Engineering.

3. Educational differences between India and Germany 

Back at home back in India, we are doing three-four hours of exams for a score of 80 or 100, but here the questions are a bit different. They’re more focused on developing your problem-solving skills, not by learning question papers of the last 10 years, but by giving case studies. 

If you have taken a subject like system aspects in communication, they will give you the concepts in the class and then you will have tutorial classes where the PhD students who are under the professor will do some mathematical problems and some real-life problems with you. The exam then will be based on a kind of problem where you will be told, for example, “Today Nokia decided to set BTS in this place in Munich, these are the parameters involved.” 

The questions then will ask you to design the different steps of installing a BTS. I mean, the concepts are from the class that you have studied, but it's not something that you would expect in India. If I talk about my university, there were no case studies or anything and we were a bit spoon-fed back home.

4. Cultural differences and how to navigate them

It's different but it's not hard to get accustomed to it because when you're coming as a student, there are so many other people who are also coming from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or China. There are so many people and you all are new so you get along very well because you all have the same mentality at that time.

I was in Munich and it's one of the most international cities, you won't even realise that you are an outsider because no one cares. You go study, go home, go to a club, go to a park, go to a restaurant, whatever but no one gives a damn about who you are or where you come from. Of course, there are hand-picked experiences of some individuals, but that’s not the case for most people I’d say.

The biggest suggestion I can give is to start studying German before coming here because once you start speaking the language, everything becomes a hundred times easier for you.

5. Looking for part-time jobs

Unless you’re loaded, you need to do a part-time job and they pay well. If you get one, you can work 20 hours max in a week, which is 80 hours a month and you can earn as much as 1500-1700 euros depending on the company. 

I initially started working for a restaurant called Osteria here, which is a pizza chain. I was in the back kitchen and could make let's 600-700 hundred euros. But then I also started doing food delivery, like we have Swiggy at home, and I could make 500-600 hundred euros a month.

So in general, an average student can make 1000 to 1200 euros as a part-time employee and that's good money, which allows you to save your blocked account money unless you’re spending a lot. You can live like a king.

So my biggest advice to anyone coming here would be to try to live off what you make from the part-time job and start applying for them from India. Don't wait to come here and then start applying. Once you have the enrollment letter and you know you’re going, apply apply apply. Getting a job at a restaurant, where really 70% of employees in Munich for example are students, is relatively easy.

6. Getting an actual job 

Here you start by applying on Xing, LinkedIn, Indeed, and StepStone. These are the big career social networks that work well. Speak to your professors a lot, they have contacts and apply a lot. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get replies. That’s the biggest thing really: If you know your grades are good, your resume, etc is good and you’re applying to the correct places, then don’t lose heart it’ll eventually work out.

It’s a volume game and a lot of people lose heart but knowing that, so not letting it affect you is the most important thing I feel.

I got some interviews, then I got rejected two out of every five rejections because of language as I did not speak fluently at that time and the other three were coding interviews. But applied continuously for five-six months and then I landed a job at a research institute as a junior researcher. And then making the next switch was not that difficult, because I was then in the system working, and my language had improved.

So if you're doing a good job, if you show your good performance as a working student, like 80% of the time, until and unless something really bad happens, you will get a full-time opportunity. 

7. Most important advice

The first thing is to learn the language. It's extremely necessary and I cannot stress enough. For example, I’m not fully fluent, and am looking for senior positions but in senior positions, you need to speak the language like your mother tongue. And I’ve been here for eight years.

So to make it here: language, language, language. 

It changes your life.

Second thing, don't be disheartened because there will be rejections. If I show you my Excel sheet, you will start laughing at how someone can be so naive applying to these companies even though they have rejected you 20 times. But if you don’t apply you won’t get any, so don’t be disheartened, be prepared for six to eight months of struggle to get a job, and don’t let others' success bother you.

And lastly, it’ll be to not pay more than 33% of your income for your housing at any point. The smartest thing to do is to find the apartment before you even arrive here because when you’re here and desperate, you can get scammed a lot. I have seen people losing money because they are desperate. So focus on getting an apartment and picking up bits of the language before you’ve even landed, it’ll improve your life here you don’t even know by how much.