this is me in tables

Born into a vibrant city like New York in 1995, my parents raised me and my two younger sisters in a small town in the Black Forest. Always happy to draw, paint, collage, write and record – in short: create – I became co-founder and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper in High School and choose Fine Arts as one ofm major subjects to graduate in.

Right after graduating, I boarded what felt like the first plane to fulfill the biggest dream I had dreamt so far: New York City, Fashion Industry. Lacking the confidence to dive into design, I interned with Carolina Herrera’s PR department for six months at the young age of 18. Here I learned that, while Fashion is an amazingly interesting industry, I personally want to go broader in my studies, keeping my options open to explore different fields and topics.

So I – the big city hearted girl – applied to the only university I knew would start their program just a month after my return from New York and more importantly offered a program that felt perfect for me: Communications, Culture, and Management at Zeppelin University on the most southern edge of Germany. Here I learned a lot about the world and even more about myself.

The classes taught me to be critical, political, opinionated, and smart about all of the above. Meanwhile, I got to explore my passion for journalism with the student radio welle20, where I became editor-in-chief I for one and a half years. Besides that I became the go-to designer for several student organizations who heard about and thereby helped me built my creative skills.

Not being too fond of the geographical placement of my university, I took on to explore the world on every occasion. This led not only to adventurous travels through South-East Asia, Europe, and the United States but also several internships. In Berlin, I helped a young founder with developing the very first stages of a start-up that became to be successful before blowing up four years later. Having fallen in love with Germany’s capital I returned for another internship at another startup, this time the feminist online magazine Edition F. Excited about working in journalism I continued on to intern at another startup magazine, this time print, Big Life, a quarterly publication based in the gorgeous heart of Idaho, Sun Valley.

For my semester abroad, life gave me a gift: I got to live, study, and work in Tel Aviv, Israel. Here, for the first time, I had classes that brought me in touch with the field of advertising and design. When thanking my teacher for all that she had brought into my life she highly encouraged me to pursue a career in advertising and apply to Miami Ad School.

But, to be honest, my focus during that semester was not on school. On the one hand, I was interning with The Perspective, an online platform, that again let me dive deeper into writing in a political and educational sphere. On the other hand, my friends encouraged me to practice yoga with them. As I had built a practice of my own over the past years, I became their instructor, igniting an unknown light within me. So, as soon as I returned home from my semester abroad and before writing my bachelor thesis, I completed my 200hr Yoga Teacher Training – the most passionate and nerdy three weeks my personality has ever experienced.

As I had already worked out more than enough credits for university, I wrote my bachelor thesis whilst traveling/living with my parents. For my thesis I returned to my passion of journalism, writing about the uprising of Podcasts, evolving from a trend- to a high-quality media source. My hard work was rewarded with not only an amazing grade but also a research-award by my school.

So here I was: blonde, glitter-loving communication-student slash yoga-teacher slash hobby-designer slash writer focusing on female empowerment facing the great big world. I had already fulfilled my “childhood dream” when I was eighteen just to realize that wasn’t it. Suddenly I felt that urge to prove that I was more than a pretty face doing pretty things. Inspired to also explore a new city I signed up for a 9-week Bootcamp with Le Wagon, a coding-school teaching you how to program a web-app using the open-source Ruby on Rails framework in Barcelona, Spain. Again this experience can be summed up by saying that I learned plenty and even more about myself.

During that experience, I realized that, yes, coding was fun, but the more design we added, the more passionate I got. So, just as back when applying for university, I decided to “just go for it” and see if I had what it takes to get into a school that I had been following ever since I was sixteen: Miami Ad School. Needless to say I got accepted.

Before finally moving to Berlin, I worked for two NGOs. For one, I designed and curated an exhibition for a convent in my hometown Freiburg. For the other, founded by a friend of mine, I visited Nepal, getting to know the projects that I had already worked towards during the past two years.

This is where this story could end: me, living in Berlin, teaching yoga, and studying at Miami Ad School. But that would be life without COVID.

So, one more paragraph on life since March 2020.
The moment I found out, that we won’t have school for four months and I would most probably not be able to teach yoga, I called up my best friend and asked him, if he still wanted me to help out in his Start Up’s marketing team. Four days later I was a working student with the marketing team at Küchenheld, a startup selling kitchens online, where I learned many new things about the business side of marketing and – as always – a lot about myself. More than any other experience the days of COVID made me grateful for my ability to see the best in everything and turn anything around to the better. Or, to put it into my current copywriter Shruthi’s words: “I throw anything at you and you find a way to make it relevant.”

Ready to find silver linings together?