When I tell people in Osnabrück that I am going to England for my semester abroad, they ask where. When I say Hull, the conversation usually pauses.
It is not the answer they expect. The expected answers are London, Edinburgh, maybe Manchester. Hull is a port on the east coast that most Germans cannot place on a map. It is a city that lost its fishing industry, voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union, and appears in economics papers more often than in travel guides.
That is exactly why I want to go.
I am studying economics, and next year I will take modules on global financial crises and international business at the University of Hull. I could read about deindustrialisation in a seminar room in Osnabrück. I could read about the long shadow of 2008, about the towns that never quite recovered, about why an open economy can feel, to the people living in it, like something that was done to them rather than for them. I have read about these things. The reading is not the problem.
The problem is that I keep noticing a gap between the models and the places. Economics on paper is clean. It has curves and equilibria and assumptions that hold. Economics in a city that watched its docks empty out is something else. I want to spend a semester in a place where that gap is visible from the window of the bus.
I am not arriving with a thesis to prove. I am arriving with questions. What does a town do after the industry that defined it is gone? What does a young person there study, and why, and where do they imagine going afterwards? How does a country that left the European Union talk about Europe now, in a pub, on a Tuesday, when no one is performing for a camera? These are not questions I can answer from Lower Saxony.
There is also the smaller, more honest reason. I have spent my degree in one country, in one language, in one set of assumptions about how the world works. Hull is partnered with my university, the academic fit is good, and the courses align with the direction I want my studies to take. But the real value of going is not the credits. It is six months of being slightly uncomfortable, slightly slower than everyone around me, slightly forced to listen before I speak.
I think that is what a semester abroad is actually for. Not to confirm what I already know about economics, but to stand inside an example of it and pay attention.
This scholarship would help me do that properly.
