Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes contact seminar in Bonn, Germany 2023

During the first weekend of December, we participated in the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes contact seminar, where we met with holders of the prestigious Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes scholarship. It is the oldest and largest organization funding gifted students in Germany. The foundation supports young people with outstanding talents who can be expected to make an exceptional contribution to society. Students are admitted based on their intellectual or creative skills, their dedication and motivation, and wide-ranging extracurricular interests.

Only five companies had the opportunity to be present at the contact seminar, so we were especially honored to be taking part this year.  

Our CTO Arno and Software engineers Alina, Christian, Sebastian, and Tobias (some of them also previous scholarship holders) met with selected students to interview them for technical positions at think-cell, whilst the second day of the contact seminar was dedicated to workshops. Here is what the team had to say about the experience:

“During the first day of the seminar, we gave students the chance to experience an interview at think-cell, and we hope they got a good impression of how the recruiting process at larger software companies works. In our two-part workshop, we shared our passion for excellent code as well as software engineering. We let the students implement a simple but uncommon algorithm and discussed how to find concise and easy to understand implementations. In the second part, we developed a major software feature together, from the first customer idea down to the technical details.

The event gave us the unique opportunity to talk to a number of excellent students with backgrounds that are far more varied than we usually encounter. For us, this was an invigorating experience that brought us new perspectives, new ideas and a lot of fun. Likewise, we hope the students learned something useful for their day-to-day programming, their career and maybe their lives.”

On Friday evening, after a lovely dinner together, we had the chance to mingle with students in a casual setting to get to know them better. Our team, including Anna and Ingmar from our HR and IT departments, had the chance to talk to students about our unique culture and the different opportunities at think-cell. The students asked some insightful questions that led to many interesting conversations, which we truly enjoyed.

A big thank you to Studienstiftung for a well-organized seminar. It was a pleasure to meet the scholarship holders and everyone else involved. Until next time!