by Jane Yager

For Michael Schönstein, 25, the Professional Year at the German Ministry of Health began quietly enough. It was August, the holiday season, and not much seemed to be going on; besides, he knew that one can work in a ministry for years without really having any contact with the minister. But suddenly, everything changed. Michael found himself standing in front of a deputy minister, called upon to explain what policy he advised and why. “It was intimidating,” Michael admits. He’d arrived at the ministry without any background in health and faced a steep learning curve. From that point on, he was plunged into the centre of the ministry.

One of the main projects he worked on was EU HIV/AIDS policy. “I was dealing with completely different actors,” Michael recalls. “Pharmaceutical company lobbyists, NGO activists, people from international organisations, people from other ministries: they were all sitting around the same table and my job was to bring everyone on board. It didn’t make things easy but it was very exciting.” The pace of work was more than fast, and every day decisions had to be made on “an extremely tight timeframe.”

Even now, with the Professional Year completed and his Hertie studies begun, Michael seems not quite to fathom his experience at the Ministry. Speaking over coffee outside the Hertie library, he likens the pace of decision-making there to “taking off in your plane before you’ve even constructed the runway to land on.” He marvels at the rarity of the chance the Professional Year offered him.

“Before you even go to a school, they get you a job. Not an internship, not a project, but an actual job working as a policy advisor,” he says with astonishment.

One thing the Professional Year didn’t offer was time to reflect on his experience. Now, in his classes at the Hertie School, he can look systematically at the dynamics he experienced at the Ministry. He finds the difference between the words “governance” and “government” especially instructive for understanding his experience working on health policy in cooperation with so many actors outside the government sphere. “When you have such complex systems,” he asks, “how do you steer?”

For Michael, the Hertie School and the Professional Year solved several quandaries. Hailing from Freiburg, Germany, he’d studied economics and international relations at St. Andrews University in Scotland, an experience betrayed by the faint Scottish lilt in his voice. He felt tugged in mutually exclusive directions at the end of his studies. He wanted to start graduate studies but he also wanted to get work experience. He enjoyed the richness of the experience of living abroad, but knew that “if you want to work politically you’re bound by your nationality”; a serious political career would necessitate a return to Germany. He had offers of consulting jobs but he wanted to deal with people “not just as clients but in their capacity as human beings.” He’d applied, and been accepted, to doctoral programmes in economics, but felt the need to broaden rather than narrow his field of knowledge.

With the Hertie School and the Professional Year Programme, Michael found a way to “have my cake and keep it” on all counts. Here was serious upfront work experience embedded in a graduate programme. Here was a chance to go back to Germany yet continue to live and work in a truly international atmosphere. Michael finds in the classroom that the students “learn at least as much from one another as we do from our books and articles.” He values the culture of learning and discussion the school fosters: “You cannot teach anyone to be the perfect policy maker, the perfect political advisor, but you can make sure that everyone here gets challenged, all of their opinions and arguments.”

And now that there is finally time to reflect on his Professional Year, he has to shake his head in wonder. “There is no other school in the world that has anything remotely similar,” he says.