Best way to improve oneself

Hello, my name is Nikos Tzakis, I am 22 years old and I’m an international student from Greece. At this really moment, I’m back to my home country, so I can sum up all the experiences I lived in Remagen as a student of RheinAhrCampus. I’m writing this in order to show you how the whole experience went from my point of view, which things I learned and how much I improved myself through this.

First of all, when I applied for the Erasmus+ Program everything around me was not that good due to the Corona pandemic, so I was not sure if it’s a good decision to go abroad. I was at my home university and we couldn’t even go for a walk for more than one hour because we had so many cases in the whole Greece. One year ago, I applied for being an Erasmus student in the winter semester, but I postponed it for the summer semester so things would have time to get better.

When the time came and I came to Remagen everything was so unstable and I was way out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t sure if everything will go according to my plan, but there was no option, the only thing I could do is to try it. I met my first Erasmus friends per Zoom, while we all were in the same tiny town, Remagen. I can say that it was way too weird, for sure. After a week or two, I met almost all of them and then, I understood that it would be an amazing experience.

We did many things together, but always we were careful about the Covid restrictions. We played a lot of basketball and ping pong, we saw many places in Germany, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, but the best thing that I did there with all these friends was to exchange interesting information about our cultures. I met people from many countries with way more different cultures and I really enjoyed it.

One more interesting point that I want to mention and that I enjoyed was how the lecturers kept me motivated and productive on such difficult days. There were many courses like IBS (International Business Simulation), where I had the opportunity to be the Head of the Marketing Department and interact in a company with many nationalities in English. I can see that this course improved me in many ways, I improved my English a lot and at the end of the course, I wasn’t that nervous as I was at the start. I learned how to do a proper presentation, I did a real job interview, and last but not least, I learned that I can improve myself a lot from my mistakes. The decision to take part in this course and get out of my comfort zone with being the head of Marketing was one of the highlights during my semester abroad.

To sum up, I’m pretty sure that this semester was really important for my future, while I also met some really important people that I will meet in the future again, for sure. The only drawback was that the whole experience was during the hard times of Covid, but at the end of the day, I can say for sure that I feel thankful for this opportunity to study abroad this semester at RheinAhrCampus.