How a project idea can become more - Students of the European New School report

"When I saw the MoDE, it immediately caught my eye as it was completely different from what I had seen before.

Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, it has always been in my mind that I wanted to have my own project at some stage of my life. However, so far, this had been more of a dream rather than real plans. Studying the MoDE Master’s enabled me to start thinking of this idea as a real project and I have been able to work on it.

I have liked it quite a lot so far. The multidisciplinary approach of it allowed me to gain some knowledge from different fields, and although some may not necessarily fit 100 percent with my idea, it is still very interesting. The professors are very passionate about their fields and are very engaged with the students, which made the first semester go well even though the restrictions didn’t allow us to have classes on campus.

My dream is to create a sustainable clothing brand. As I mentioned before, thanks to the MoDE Master’s, it has moved from dream to idea to project and, although it is a big one, I am happy to be taking steps towards it within my studies at ENS. The program has given me the space to question the concept of it, add or change characteristics and generally learn which steps I must follow in order to make it happen in Germany."

"First off, from a very young age I wanted to acquire enough knowledge and practice to become an international lawyer supporting society’s most vulnerable groups. Then, the world is constantly facing situations of massive development at a dizzying pace, such as the use of technologies and globalization. The mixture of both pushed me to consider digital transformation as a viable area to provide legal aid to as many people as possible.

It has been a very good experience so far. I am impressed by how all people at ENS collaborate to make the MoDE program bigger and better. The mixture of people with different professional backgrounds coming from all over the world has built a great community.

Unfortunately, the Corona pandemic triggered specific problems for me when trying to obtain and extend my residence permit to remain in Europe and it was hard not to be able to travel anywhere, including my birth country.

An ideal goal is to build a company by ourselves, maybe with external parties, or with peers and colleagues from the MoDE program. The areas that the program is targeting are so diverse that we, as students, might take very different directions of specialization to create new companies or to make existing ideas and models bigger and better.

As for myself, at all professional stages I found that, whenever there was a need to provide administrative support answering enquiries to internal and external parties, the same problems arose: Firstly, the difficulties for vulnerable people to gain access to legal advice, and secondly, once said people have managed to gain access, the enormous number of juridical enquiries caused by general confusion, ignorance, and errors of advisors.

My digital entrepreneurship, at least the general idea of it, is to generate a system that will streamline consultations with a legal approach and generate legal documents to use/activate legal resources and mechanisms. The overall aim is to reduce the margin of error of such legal advice as much as possible."

"I wasn’t planning on continuing with my studies after my BA, to be honest – I felt like there was nothing out there I’m really interested in that could bring me closer to where I want to go. When I found out about ENS, I knew this program was the one.

ENS offers many subjects that are very relevant in today's job market - from privacy policy topics to the digitalization of businesses. Besides that, the university gives you the opportunity to connect with like-minded people, working on their individual fascinating projects – which make the experience so much more exciting.

I really enjoy studying at ENS thus far – attending classes online was definitely a steep learning curve for all of us (both students and teachers), but now I feel like it has become a new normal.

In 2019, I started my own company (good-socks.de) with the idea of supporting homeless people on the streets of Berlin. The idea is very simple: with every pair of socks sold, one is donated to a homeless person. Although the project is very small right now, the mission and vision of the company is to build a new way of distributing resources - building a world, where charity is not an act of heroism but part of our daily routine."

Maria Ekielska (Poland)