Eldar Abraham

I am Eldar, a 22-year-old from Tel-Aviv, Israel. I recently got my Master's Degrees in Data Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. My research lies in the intersection between Natural Language Processing and Causal Inference. My romance with the German language started during my Bachelor's, when I took German classes and absolutely loved it!

In August 2022 I landed in Berlin to start my German language course at the TU Berlin, the technical university of Berlin. I was quite excited to have a new and refreshing daily routine, one that is entirely mine, but in a different place than my home in Tel-Aviv. I wanted to have a place that I could call "home" apart from my real home.

With this in mind, I took my first S-Bahn to the TU, a rather refreshing experience for me as a Tel-Avivian. The immediate thing that I noticed was the harmonic pace the public transportation works at. The stations are busy, the German announcements are everywhere, there are many platforms where many trains pass, and many passengers go on and off the train. Although I have been in other major cities around the world, this experience was quite overwhelming for me, and the frequency and efficiency of the train truly amazed me. The experience with public transportation in Israel is not like that. We mostly have buses and regional trains. The experience of being in the middle of the beating heart of the city, but at the same time experiencing such harmony was different and pleasant to me.

When I came to school we were divided into a few groups, according to our German level. I got the B1 group, which was instructed by Katrin, an easy going and very nice teacher. My classmates were from all over the world: Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, India, Tunisia, Poland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan! Meeting so many people coming from di-verse places was mind-opening. For me, the nicest thing about our group was that each one of us came from a different culture, but at the same time we had common interests in science and engineering. In addition, we were all united towards one goal - to learn German and enrich ourselves! I admire the German attitude and understanding of the importance of solidarity, equality and acceptance of the other. These values, which I find very important, are promoted in Israel but not as much as they are promoted in Germany. I find it important to further promote these values in Israeli education and I definitely took inspiration from the German approach to these topics.

Privat

At the language school

As the course progressed, we got to read, write, speak, teach, and even think in German. We strengthened our inter-group and intra-group social connections. From the diverse group that was our class, I have one outlasting personal connection with an Indian friend. More than a year after we finished the course we kept in touch and I will visit him in India next month! The idea of visiting him excites me, because I will get to experience the place the way the locals experience it, with a private guide who also happens to be my friend from the summer school in Berlin. What an international experience! In relation to that, one thing that was noticeable for me as a difference between Israeli and German everyday life was the developed spontaneous and improvisation skills the Israelis have, as opposed to the Germans.

One of the things I was prouder of through the course was my German presentation about the field of statistical machine learning: "Wie lernen Maschinen?". Although I am very familiar with the field because of my studies, having to introduce it in German to other students was a challenge I was eager to complete. Indeed, I got to present it and I think the class liked it as there was a lot of engagement! I think this presentation has opened a hatch for future collaborations with the other students. We all exchanged knowledge about our fields of study, and it was amazing to see how everyone of us is invested in a different field. I especially remember that I had a discussion with one of the Mechanical Engineering students in class about how our fields of study can integrate.

After four weeks of German course, we all had to say goodbye and come back to our home countries. The last evening in school was an international evening with all sorts of cultural dishes from all over the world - a very diverse and tasty experience. We all said goodbye and felt like we wanted this to last longer!