Chapter 1: Mexico
I was born in Mexico City. My childhood was great. I am a single child I had everything but thank God I wasn’t very spoiled…
…well I was a little…
…but I was good at school too! My best friend is also a single child and our mothers are very close. Our birthdays are only one day apart. I don’t have siblings, but he is like a brother to me. I am in Germany, he is in Mexico.
We both were always good at math & physics and wanted to do something technical or to invent something. In the last years of high school, we had a course to find a profession. We were doing tests and projects to choose a profession and I selected two favourites: Aeronautical Engineering & Accounting with Risk Management. I wanted to be an Actuary one day.
I started to get ready for the admission exam in a public school (UNAM), but my family was a little reluctant to send me to the state university and insisted that I go to a private university – ITESM in the metropolitan area in Mexico City.
My parents insisted that I go to private schooling because they couldn’t have it in their childhood.
Sadly, majors I wanted were not offered and after a conversation with the director, I got admission in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization, which sounded good as well.
Studying at ITESM was amazing. The beauty is that the school belongs to a group of companies and there are many interesting partnerships between the university and these companies – the campus is very big; laboratories are full of modern machines and equipment. In the first year, when I had to choose a foreign language, I took German. Interest in the country started developing with the language.
During my studies, I took advantage of spare time and engaged in 3 internships. One of them was the most memorable because I learnt what it is like to be under the supervision of 2 brand different bosses:
Boss #1
I never took industrial engineers seriously until I encountered this one. He was the boss, and he was making the decisions. He was nice, polite and knew how to handle the team of engineers. We were all very different: one guy simply came to work and wore headphones all day long and left. Every day the same. The others were completely opposite: chitchatting and more social. He managed to direct and unite every one of us. Within 10 months, he got 2 awards and promotion. I found out, that he had joined company 2 years before, so he was growing in the rank very fast.
I was always thinking that reading a book was enough to become a businessman. I was wrong. It is not about how much expertise in the topic you have or how much technical knowledge you have. It is about the people. The better you manage people, the better you will do in a company.
He had a big influence on my decision for a major in my Graduate Studies and I thank him for that. At this moment I decided not to go into specific Engineering field, but rather to choose for my a completely different topic.
I loved this boss
Boss #2.
He was my direct supervisor. He was constantly throwing work at me with not very clear explanations. Lean management and Six Sigma were the two strong things he cared about. What he didn’t realize is that I had no clue how to do what he expected from me. He wanted me to do Ishikawa Diagrams, Root-cause analysis, among other things.
To do what?
I had no knowledge about it. He seemed never happy with my work and I couldn’t even understand why. He pushed me to the limit:
“You have to prepare a report and a dashboard to present to the Director our numbers and performance”
“But I do not know how to use Excel that well.”
“There is Google and you can ask me.”
I learnt the formulas, I pushed myself. The presentation went flawless. He congratulated for my work. It was the first time I had been pushed to my limits and when I reached them, then I realized I just grew up!
Sadly, the internships were the only highlights. As the university years passed, I became more and more unhappy with my life in Mexico.
In my personal experience, there are two types of people in Mexico and I am sure you encountered both in your life:
Very friendly people, who are very nice and always willing to help.
People whom you cannot trust; they will try to cheat you, to take something away from you or to take advantage of you.
I always wanted to meet other nationalities, to travel or to do an exchange semester, but for one reason or another I just procrastinated, and the deadline passed. I had to wait for the next semester and then a semester after and then it was the last year and I could no longer do an exchange, because you need to graduate in Mexico, so I missed my chance again.
Luckily, my Russian professor, teaching me 3 courses, offered a summer program for ITESM students – 5 weeks exchange in Russia. The program was offered in cooperation with Moscow Aviation Institute. English-taught Aeronautical Engineering program with flight simulations including jumps with a parachute from a military plane!.
Without hesitation, I took this option and it was spectacular! Major fact: In Moscow, I met my girlfriend. She is a French Aeronautical Engineer. I loved studying in Russia. With one of my closes friends, we both extended our Russian trip to Europe and flew from Moscow to Hamburg. We visited Bamberg & Munich and concluded our trip with a 1-month road trip in Spain visiting his family.
I took a look. I compared and I decided: I will study a master’s degree in Germany.
When my girlfriend had to go back to France and I had to go to Mexico, she was invited to do an interesting Internship in Germany. What a coincidence.
Chapter 2: Germany
