"Everyone is important here!"

Kim Schwarz actually wanted to become a veterinarian. She grew up in southern Hesse near Frankfurt am Main, and even as a student she was interested in the natural sciences; she took advanced biology. Animals have remained her passion; she has two dogs, one of which moved with her to Zittau in the summer of 2022.

Here at the HSZG, she is pursuing a master’s degree programme in integrated management systems. “I hadn’t even considered Zittau, ” says Kim Schwarz. She is 31, highly motivated, pragmatic, and unattached. All doors are open to her, thanks in part to the small, interdisciplinary degree programme led by Dr. Jana Brauweiler at the university in Zittau. It is precisely this unusual degree programme that has brought Kim Schwarz to Zittau—from the multicultural West to the distant East. Her friends ask her the same thing: “Where on earth did you end up?” But Kim Schwarz just shrugs her shoulders resolutely. She feels at home in the university environment, has made friends, and is happy to be studying at a small university—a subject that hardly anyone else in Germany is studying—and which no other university actually offers in this form.

She likes it here. The close-knit atmosphere in Zittau. The opportunities for growth, precisely because it’s not an overcrowded degree programme. There’s no jealousy among students—their backgrounds are too diverse for that; her classmates come from fields such as finance, food technology, and landscape and urban planning. After Kim Schwarz earned her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering in Bingen am Rhein and spent five and a half years working in the private sector in the Rhine-Main region, gaining professional experience, she came across the master’s degree programme in integrated management systems in Zittau while doing her research. She spent a weekend exploring the area beforehand— “I couldn’t just jump in at the deep end, ” she says. She liked what she saw, found an apartment quickly—even though she never would have expected to—and began her master’s program in Zittau last summer.

She wanted something different—to get some fresh air again—and to shift from a technical focus to a more strategic one. Lately, she’s also been struggling with her company’s waste management industry and the way it tends to sweep its own waste under the rug, so to speak. Kim Schwarz needs new perspectives. Everyone she tells about her plans for the master’s program in Zittau reacts in much the same way: “Everyone knows Zwickau,” they say. She laughs when she recounts this. Kim Schwarz had no problem at all with moving to the east. Now she walks to the university; Building VI on the banks of the Kül is her home, just a fifteen-minute walk from Westpark. “I can settle in quickly, ” she says, “and Zittau has become my home!”

Kim Schwarz has been a university employee since October 1 of this year—her position is split into two parts and runs concurrently with her Master's thesis: Continuing education management focuses on process optimization and digitization, while the second part deals with sustainability reporting—a highly topical issue and, for Kim Schwarz, the basis for her Master's thesis. “I’m in the fortunate position of being able to work independently and, above all, on a project basis—everything I develop in my project goes into my Master's thesis.” The downside of tackling controversial and highly topical subjects: there’s hardly any literature available. Kim Schwarz mainly conducts interviews with companies, listens to online seminars and webinars, and attends networking events. “I’ll only be able to contribute a small part to the solution,” she knows, but her intrinsic motivation is strong. She says, “There is no such thing as unlimited economic growth in a finite world.”

Right now, she’s poring over the EU’s newly published regulatory framework—1,200 pages of legal texts written in policy jargon. These need to be translated into a guide with actionable recommendations for small and medium-sized enterprises. The goal is to encourage companies to become more sustainable and to shift the focus toward climate neutrality. Someday, Kim Schwarz might do just that—advise SMEs to guide and support them on their path toward greater sustainability within their own companies. She isn’t worried about finding a job after she graduates. She can build enough professional connections, especially since each of her faculty advisors has at least five companies from the private sector on hand who say , “We need people like you!” Kim Schwarz also doesn’t rule out a career as a lecturer. For now, though, she’ll be poring over her Master's thesis for quite a while longer, developing good solutions for SMEs, enjoying the Zittau Mountains and Lake Olbersdorf with her dog to unwind, and perhaps learning even more about the wolf in Upper Lusatia— another topic that interests Kim Schwarz alongside her studies.

Text: Sophie Herwig