Alumni in focus

Welcome to our series of articles about the background and career as a young professional of former Digital Management students!

Alumnus Yair Bustos successfully completed his master’s degree in Digital Management at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Cologne this year. What motivated him to study digital management back then? And where does he stand on his path today? In the following, he provides a few insights:

Sometimes bad things happen for a reason. When I finished my bachelor’s in Industrial Engineering in Chile, I had one goal: to study English abroad. My plan was quite straightforward, buy the tickets, enrol in a language school, and come back to Chile after 8 months. But life decided to postpone my plans and instead of travelling, I had to start my chemotherapy treatment. I won’t lie, those were the worse months of my life, but on the good side, it gave me motivation, a lot of it, to follow my dreams. 

During those hard months I thought all the time about the plans I had and somehow, I started to change them into bigger ones. I decided then to, after learning English, study a master abroad. My medical condition got better and better, my body reacted very well to all the treatments, and I told my head doctor about my plans, to which she replied “…travel and enjoy your life, this is not coming back…”, those were the best words I could hear in months and probably in my life. 

I went to Ireland to study English and then to Germany to start my master’s in Digital Management at the Hochschule Fresenius in Cologne, while at the same time, learning German as a third language. 

I decided to study at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences due to its well-known reputation as an international business school. As business is an area of great interest to me, Fresenius had a lot to offer. In addition to that, my decision of studying a master’s in Digital Management was based on many different factors. The strongest one was how well the course curriculum fit with my own interests. Since I’m very passionate about all what’s digital, finding this program was a great discovery. 

The main motivation I had during the program was the whole experience of living abroad, I was very grateful for the chance I had to be studying far from home, meeting very nice people, and discovering new places. 

While living abroad can be tough from time to time, it is not if you are open to meet new people, which I was and I still am. I was lucky I had a nice shared apartment with nice housemates who were always willing to show me around and integrated me to their culture. I was also meeting international people at the VHS during my German classes and participating in language exchanges (tandem if you prefer) to practice my German. And of course, my classmates and friends at Fresenius were very important during my studies. Therefore I felt integrated to my class since the very beginning until the very last day. 

Along my master’s I decided to learn the programming language python to have more skills for my student job as a Data Analyst and to do my thesis in the area of Machine Learning, which I successfully did. Each lecture was well thought and designed to be hands-on using many different real-life scenarios were each one of the professors were highly qualified and had vast experience in their fields, which I was able to benefit from and apply later in my thesis. My thesis is called “Machine Learning for Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks”, where I was able to develop several machine learning models including neural networks in order to analyse the sentiment of thousands of Tweets. Along the whole process I learned about Data Science, its development, and implementations, which I proudly use today in my student job and show during my job-hunting process. 

To any person that wants to study abroad, I would say: don’t overthink and go for it, it’s easier than you think! As I mentioned before, it’s important to be open to meet new people. Learning the local language is something you will have to do sooner or later, and I will help you to adapt better and feel less foreign. German is hard, yes, but it is not impossible to learn with the right dedication. Plan ahead and do your research about where to look for accommodation and jobs. Feeling homesick is something you will experience, but it’s also something you learn to deal with, the important part of it is to recognize it and surround yourself with nice people here, that for sure you’ll meet during your studies. 

– Yair Bustos