"Everyone is important here!"

Kim Schwarz actually wanted to become a vet. She grew up in southern Hesse near Frankfurt am Main and was already interested in science as a schoolgirl; she chose biology as her advanced course. Animals have remained her passion; she has two dogs, one of which moved to Zittau with her in the summer of 2022.

Here, at the HSZG, she is studying for a Master's degree in Integrated Management Systems. "I didn't have Zittau on my radar," says Kim Schwarz. She is 31, highly motivated, pragmatic and independent. All doors are open to her, also thanks to the interdisciplinary and small course of study under Dr. Jana Brauweiler in Zittau at the university. It is precisely this unusual course of study that brings Kim Schwarz to Zittau, from the multicultural West to the distant East. Her friends ask her the same question: Where did you end up? But Kim Schwarz just shrugs her shoulders resolutely. She feels at home in the university context, has made friends, is happy to be studying at a small university, which hardly anyone else in Germany studies, and which no other university actually offers her in this form.

She likes that. The family atmosphere in Zittau. The development opportunities, precisely because it is not a crowded degree course. There is no envy among the students, as their niches are too different: her fellow students come from the fields of finance, food technology or landscape and spatial planning. After Kim Schwarz studied environmental engineering in Bingen am Rhein and worked for five and a half years in the private sector in the Rhine-Main area, gaining professional experience, she came across the Zittau Master's degree course in Integrated Management Systems during her research. She spent a weekend looking at the area beforehand, "I couldn't quite jump in at the deep end," she says. She liked it, the apartment was found quickly, although she would never have thought that, and last summer she started her Master's in Zittau.

She wanted to do something different, to get a breath of fresh air, to move from a technical to a more strategic position. She has recently been struggling with her company's waste management sector and the way it sweeps its own waste under the carpet, so to speak. Kim Schwarz needs new perspectives. Everyone she tells about her plans for the Master's degree in Zittau has a similar reaction: "You know Zwickau," they say. She laughs when she says this. Kim Schwarz didn't have any problems moving to the east. Now she walks to the university, House VI on Külzufer is her home, she only needs fifteen minutes from Westpark. "I can quickly feel at home," she says and "Zittau has become a home!"

Kim Schwarz has been a university employee since 1 October this year - her position is split into two parts and runs alongside her Master's thesis: continuing education management deals with process optimization and digitalization and the second part with sustainability reporting, a highly topical subject and for Kim Schwarz the basis for writing her Master's thesis. "I live in the luxurious state of being able to work independently and, above all, on a project basis - everything I develop in my project, I do for my Master's thesis." The disadvantage of controversial and highly topical subjects: there is hardly any literature. Kim Schwarz mainly talks to companies, listens to online seminars and webinars and goes to network meetings. "I will only be able to contribute a small part to the solution," she knows, but her intrinsic motivation is great. She says: "There is no such thing as unlimited economic growth in a limited world."

She is currently poring over the EU's newly published legal framework, 1200 pages of legal texts in political language. These are to be translated into a guide with calls to action for small and medium-sized enterprises. To encourage companies to become more sustainable, to move towards climate neutrality. Kim Schwarz could do this at some point, advising SMEs in order to accompany and guide them on the path to greater sustainability in their own companies. She is not afraid of not finding a job after her studies. She can get enough contacts, especially because the supervising professors each have at least five companies from the private sector who say: "We need people like you!" Kim Schwarz has not ruled out working as a lecturer either. For now, however, she will be brooding over her master's thesis for quite some time and developing good solutions for SMEs, enjoying the Zittau Mountains and Lake Olbersdorf with her dog to compensate and perhaps learning more about the wolf in Upper Lusatia, which is also one of the topics that interests Kim Schwarz alongside her studies.

Text: Sophie Herwig