hello everyone and welcome back to my channel if you're new around here my name is sarah and last
year in summer 2021 i studied in berlin it was mainly remote but i did manage to get out there
for a couple of months to experience it in person of course covid was a lot more of a thing then so
yeah that's really why i didn't get to experience it fully but i also have you know met a lot of
other people who were also students in berlin talked to them about the experience i do think that
i have a pretty good idea about what it's like to study in berlin and i thought they'd be useful to
share that kind of thing with you guys because i think that i would have found it useful to sort of
have things that you should probably be aware of if you're thinking of studying in berlin but yeah
just a disclaimer berlin is just such an amazing city the positives by far outweigh the negative so
yeah these are just a few things that i wish i did know before i'm originally from the uk
so yeah most of my university experience has been in the uk and a lot of this
will probably be an indirect comparison to that without further ado let's get into it
so this might be a bit of an obvious one but unless you do go to university in the center
and you live in the center you will probably have a lot of traveling to do somehow um let
me explain further the main university campuses apart from for example humboldt universität which
is right in the center other universities such as technische universität or freie universität
there are probably one or two other universities in the center but those are the main three i
believe and yeah only one of them humboldt is actually in the center so yeah you will probably
have friends dotted all around the city because that's where the sort of different accommodations
are and um yeah so if you live in the center for example you would have a lot of traveling to
do if you were going to go to freie universität for example and for example if you lived near freie
universität like i did that's great being near the campus but that it means that you've got a
lot of travelling to do to travel to the center where you know a lot of the stuff is happening
so yeah that's just something to be aware of i know it's the same for every city pretty much
or at least every capital city same kind of situation in london often if you live on one
side of the city for example the south west and you want to travel to the northeast of the city
it will probably take you over an hour probably more like an hour and a half so yeah just be warm
berlin is actually a huge place and i don't know why i was surprised by that but i kind of was
this was not a problem for me at all because it was during covid and loads of things were closed
anyway and the things that were open you needed to have a negative covid test that was
less than 24 hours old for example and they were quite hard to get hold of or not exactly easy so
yeah this did not apply to me but i would imagine that you know now things are open again they do
i believe have 24 7 u-bahn services for example i think sort of at weekends but not necessarily
during the week and if you live really far out so where i lived which was in steglitz-zehlendorf
the student village where i lived there was only a bus which went there sort of after a certain time
from the center and it sort of dropped you off sort of more than a 15-minute walk from where you
actually lived so yeah it's not ideal for nights out if you're sort of for example going out in
the center of berlin and you need to get back to your place that's on the edges of berlin after
a certain hour it's just not ideal and it's of course because berlin is huge it would be really
expensive to take a taxi um and yeah it's quite inconvenient traveling all that way by bus as well
so yeah that's another thing which is not ideal another negative of studying berlin especially as
a foreign student who perhaps is there because they want to improve their german like i was is
that in the center of berlin english is very much as a full language i think as soon as they detect
that you know you're not sort of as familiar with the place or that you know in your accent your
accent isn't sort of you know a german accent um then yeah they do start speaking to you in english
i did experience this like a lot okay i wasn't the most confident person was speaking german but
you know what i did say was you know grammatically correct and they still you know spoke to me a lot
in english which i found extremely disconcerting um you know spent 12 years learning german and
just got spoken back at in english it's it's not great that is not the case though as i've
said in a previous video sort of on the outskirts of berlin in my immediate local area in steglitz
zehlendorf they did speak a lot more german which i did appreciate so yeah it's it's the center really
which yeah a lot of english is spoken and people do assume that you do speak english and that you
would rather be spoken to in english so anything that goes against that really is sort of not
really the norm which is a bit sad another thing which i was slightly surprised about
is that in germany they don't really go in for student discounts as much or at least they're
not as widely advertised i mean if you know any differently and you have some insider information
on student discounts in germany then please let me know down below but um in germany for example like
a lot of museums did offer reduced entry for students a special price for students which i
took full advantage of but um i don't know in restaurants for example and in the drugstore
to use an american term like sort of boots or superdrug like the german equivalent of that book
shops they they really didn't seem to do student discounts like i didn't see anything like that um
in germany maybe i just was not as observant as i think i am but i'm pretty sure that i would have
noticed it at least once or twice and i'm pretty sure that i didn't so yeah as i say if you think
i'm wrong then please let me know but that's just what i noticed so yeah that's really it for
negatives of being a student in berlin as i say i was not there for long and when i was there you
know things weren't normal because it was still sort of you know covid was still a huge problem
so yeah feel free to take this video with a pinch of salt if you want to but i hope that it was
at least a tiny bit useful and yeah if you're a student in berlin at the moment and
there's anything that you would like to add or if you think i'm wrong on anything then
yeah please please comment down below it would be interesting to hear your thoughts and yeah
please like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe down below if you haven't done already
i will probably be making other videos about germany at some point and yeah other
travel videos for sure i hope that you did enjoy this video and i'll see you very soon bye for now