Timo Cordes began his year of study at the Tecnológico de Monterrey by immersing himself in Mexican culture. Together with his Mexican fellow students, the 22-year-old business administration student from Karlsruhe travelled to Mexico City for the bicentennial celebration of the country’s independence and visited the famous Cervantino cultural festival in Guanajuato and a street theatre festival in Zacatecas. “Apart from the interesting course of study and some stimulating conferences, it’s primarily these trips with my Mexican friends that are making my time here unforgettable,” enthuses Cordes.
In 2010 the DAAD funded a total of 1,511 scholarships under the German-Mexican exchange scheme. The DAAD awards scholarships to German and Mexican students, doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and academics in all scientific and arts disciplines. “Alongside Argentina, Chile and Brazil, Mexico is one of the most popular destinations in Latin America for German students,” reports Alexander Au of the DAAD. “Mexico’s universities are considered among the best in Latin America when it comes to teaching.” Mexicans who come to study in Germany often choose engineering or other technical subjects. This also explains the success of the DAAD-funded ENREM Master programme – a collaboration between Cologne University of Applied Sciences and Universidad Autonoma de San Luis Potosí, which trains specialists in environmental and resource management.
“Latin America is a huge market, and German know-how is very much in demand there,” confirms Irma de Melo-Reiners of the Bavarian Academic Centre for Latin America (BAYLAT) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. There are 1,200 German companies with a total of 250,000 employees in Brazil alone. “Knowing your way around this region guarantees success for any German graduate,” says de Melo-Reiners. More than 1,000 visitors came to BAYLAT’s German-Brazilian Academic Fair in spring 2011. The German-Brazilian Year of Science, Technology and Innovation 2010/2011, an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, was also a success. In addition to extending existing collaborations in the field of environmental technologies, medical engineering, energy, biotechnology and nanotechnology, BAYLAT also launched a project called German Language and Literature Studies in Latin America. Exchange activity is lively in other fields, too: 349 collaborations between German and Brazilian universities are currently listed by the Higher Education Compass of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK). 966 Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students went to Germany with a DAAD scholarship in 2010 alone – on study or research trips, language courses or internships. And many more young Brazilians will study in Germany in future: at the end of July 2011 Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff unveiled an ambitious government programme on study abroad; a targeted 75,000 scholarships are to take Brazilian undergraduate students, doctoral students and researchers abroad by 2014 – some of these to Germany.
After a prior feasibility study, the German-Argentine University Centre (DAHZ-CUAA) was set up in 2009. The two governments and the Science Association of German Industry in Argentina are funding the centre with 1.14 million euros for the period from 2009 to 2012. The new network university aims to bring together several already existing – as well as future – German-Argentine study programmes under one roof. The DAAD supported 408 German and 537 Argentine scholarship-holders in 2010. In addition, according to the German Rectors’ Conference, there are currently a further 130 collaborations between German and Argentine universities. “The main aim is to promote double degrees,” says Reiner Mühlsiegl, who coordinates the University Centre on the German side. Nearly 80 universities from Argentina and Germany have submitted applications for joint projects to receive 20,000 euros from the DAHZ-CUAA as start-up funding for new binational collaborations.
There is already a lively exchange with Colombia and Chile at the university level. The main players here are the DAAD CEMarin centres of excellence in Santa Marta and the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile. Together with two other centres in Thailand and Russia, they were set up in 2009 under the Federal Foreign Office’s International Science Initiative. “The idea is for the centre of excellence in Colombia to play a leading role in the marine sciences in the region,” explains Professor Thomas Wilke, CEMarin’s programme director and head of the Working Group on Systematic Zoology and Biodiversity Research at the University of Giessen, which is also involved in the Center. The DAAD supports 10 to 14 young doctoral students to the tune of 1.5 million euros every year. In Chile, the HCLA (which receives 2.1 million euros in funding) is developing further-education and study programmes for the Latin American education market in cooperation with the Universidad de Chile and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
