Last Tuesday I took the TestDaF for the second time. This time taking the test itself was much easier because it was in São Paulo. I didn’t have to travel since my parents live near the city and I could sleep over at a friend’s house so I would already be in the city at [...]

In November I’m going to take the TestDaF again. I have been preparing for it since April when I took it for the first time and even before that, but in the next weeks I plan on preparing more specifically for the test. The reason for this is that, although the TestDaF evaluates your general [...]

Moving to a higher level in the academic life requires two things: looking forward and looking back. Looking forward means preparing, planning, getting the information and doing what it takes so you can make the transition. Looking back means thinking about what you have done so far, what were your choices and where did they [...]

Last August I took another important step in order to do a Master’s in Germany: a test of Spanish language skills. That might sound contradictory for someone who’s talking about studying in Germany, but actually it’s not. Most graduate programs have English skills as a requirement alongside the already expected German language skills. Since the [...]

On my last post I talked about how to start planning if you want to study in Germany. It was mostly about how to use information like deadlines, requirements and information on selection processes to create a plan that is useful for you. Now I would like to talk about how to put that in [...]

Some people don’t like planning; others can’t go to sleep without knowing exactly what’s going to happen the next day. But when you want to move to another country to study there for some months or a longer period, most people would agree that some level of planning is necessary. Maybe the first thing to [...]

Reading about how to apply for the Master, I soon realized that I was probably going to apply via uni-assist. Uni-assist is a German service that assists international students while applying for a university program in Germany. Not all German universities use uni-assist, but many do. So if you are a foreign student, have earned [...]

Yesterday I went to a German cooking and speaking party here in Barão Geraldo, the district of Campinas where my university is. The party was organized by Chiara, the Austrian intern for this semester at Unicamp’s Language Center, to show her students how to cook one of Austria’s typical dishes: Spätzle! Most of the guests [...]

Another thing that worried me as I made my plans was how I was going to pay for living costs while studying in Germany. As a foreign student from outside the European Union I would only be allowed to work for a certain number of hours per week (read more about this here) and this [...]

When I started to make all these plans and try my best so I could study in Germany I also realized that there was something very basic I would need: money. Maybe not for the trip itself, because it was still so far away, but especially for everything I would have to do in the [...]