Our professor for the course Social Entrepreneurship always claims to be a Brit - most of the jokes he made during the class are either originated from Britain or intended against it. But he is not. He was born and raised in Berlin and then moved to Britain for his university. According to one of my German friends, Bela, his accent is distinctly Berliner. According to him, such accent sounds markedly more proletarian than those spoken at the Bremen region. My friend would laugh at the statement while I sat along perplexed - I just got a dire 2.33 grade for the first quiz of my German A1.2 class, in no way am I expected to understand anything they are talking about. Professor once said, get used to it. For God's sake I even changed my name from Billie to Steven in exchange for a 1.0 from his course - although I'm usually not infuriated and would still laugh when those speaking German have laughed.
His course is the most fun and interactive thus far I have encountered at Jacobs University. But it is the fact that he is leaving after this semester for the software engineering field that he dared to play it light - once kicking down a chair in class because he was forcibly moved out of D-Forge (It is called Bremen Design Thinking Forge in full and is owned by Prof. Lattemann who taught me International Business during the first semester) without being given advanced notice, once dancing to a folk song because this current generation of youth just won't get what rock n' roll means for those born during the 1970s. I have long been dubbing myself as the champion for rock spirit, with my favorite line of quote from Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong "I'm not fucking Justin Bieber you motherfuckers" as one of my mottos for life - I have never heard of any of those songs he was dancing to.
On Friday mornings that precede Social Entrepreneurship, I also attend another of his class called Public Policy and Management, from which a lot of jokes he used at Social Entrepreneurship come from and on which a lot of jokes from Social Entrepreneurship is reused. He is evidently aware of this fact, and would tell the students who attend both courses try to fake a smile so that other students won't be overly embarrassed. He himself is a political scientist working for European Union agencies for years, and is extremely prone to make fun of his fellow political scientists for their de facto ability to analyze everything and their ante facto inability to predict anything, and that such a fact makes him an old cynic afraid of the new waves of what he consider the intelligently superior human beings. I wouldn't say that I love the professor. As a university student, I have no reason to love someone who will abandon his professorship for software engineering. However, I do think he possesses certain aspects worth imitating when I transcend the horizon of what is merely a university, a grad school, a company or a career.
On his last week's Social Entrepreneurship class I also met with a start-up entrepreneur named Anton, who came to our class to introduce us to what is important for starting a business, and ended up, with his mildly classic British accent, talking about the importance of building a habit, and how it changes everything - a TEDx talk show abridged of self-introduction, reasoning process, and humor. With a standalone version of his conclusion, I still delightedly composed an email for an internship position at his company during the summer, because although I don't agree with his self-elevation in class, I do agree with his courage to actually start a company. However, after the class when I had the small chat with him, he told me what he aspires is an Elon Musk style of changing the world. "This is got to be bad. I don't want to change the world, I just like to fix it, and make some money off of it." And then he told me to send him an email to continue to the conversation, and moved back to staring at his computer screen. Now it's almost a week I still haven't sent him my email, I haven't even drafted - because I never had that kind of vision to change the society for the better, I only sought to prevent it from getting worse. I'd still write him an email though, because I don't want to apply for a job at the dish washing industry during the summer - there are already too many university students for it.
