Students with refugee experience Students with refugee experience

As an international academic, either with or without refugee experience, you are likely to face diverse challenges and barriers related to entering the German labour market. These include what employers view as insufficient formal academic qualifications – often despite formal recognition through the Federal Employment Agency's International Placement Service (ZAV) for qualified employees from abroad – and a lack of practical experience in the field within the German labour market, as well as a lack of labour-market specific networking contacts within businesses, professional associations and other organisations relevant to labour-market policy.

To overcome these barriers, the HAW Hamburg Centre for Migration Research and Integration Practice has developed the new BachelorUP study programme for international academics with and without refugee experience. The programme aims to provide you with a higher-education framework for the best possible and quickest possible transformation of the academic and professional skills you have brought with you.

Simultaneously, HAW Hamburg sees itself as an organisation capable of learning and willing to implement transformational processes that recognise and utilise the plurality of society as a source of potential and energy for its own development. It has therefore initiated and implemented concrete needs-based measures to support and accompany the diverse student body in preparing for and starting studies at HAW Hamburg, as well as throughout the entire study period up to and including successful entry into the German labour market.

The systematic skills assessment at the beginning of the BachelorUP programme (subject-specific and general knowledge, subject-related language skills in German and English) provides you with a framework for goal-oriented, individual development. Through attendance at regular knowledge-enhancing courses from the module plan of the relevant Bachelor's degree course together with multilingual subject-specific tutorials, a study project related to the degree course, a subject-specific internship and a Bachelor's thesis in cooperation with a company, you will obtain the academic qualifications necessary to successfully enter the job market.

The welcome tutors support and advise you and also serve, alongside the central employees, as important contact people for the participating professors and employees in the individual departments. You can also receive personal advising about your life situation for a longer period of time if necessary. This pedagogical advising focuses on expanding students' subject-specific and general skills, subject-related language skills and professional skills through advising, coaching and qualification.

Centre for Migration Research and Integration Practice
The BachelorUP study programme for international academics is offered by the Centre for Migration Research and Integration Practice, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Louis Henri Seukwa, the HAW Hamburg Executive Board's representative for migration-related university development. As a 'laboratory for migration-related university development', the centre's measures facilitate suitable education opportunities for people with refugee and migration experience through a systematic emphasis on these individuals' resources and skills.

The centre's overarching goal is to bundle and link academic activities in the area of migration and integration in order to ensure that they are systematically developed and advanced on an ongoing basis, both within the university and in the Hamburg metropolitan region.

The  BachelorUP study programme for international academics is funded by the German Academic Exchange Serivce's (DAAD) Integra and Welcome programmes with financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).