“Indecisiveness has always been my greatest enemy. At the University of Vienna, I could convert my weaknesses into strengths. My name is Ludmila Peterková. I come from Slovakia, but I am of Russian origin, which is why I grew up bilingually. I was not only exposed to languages at home, but I also found them fascinating as a school subject. Indeed, I found nearly all of my subjects fascinating, especially biology and physics.
Having obtained my secondary-school leaving certificate, I decided to study Transcultural Communication at the University of Vienna. It was a big, exhausting but also interesting challenge for me to study two additional languages in a foreign language. After a year, I even got a merit scholarship for which I am incredibly grateful. At this moment, everything seemed to be all right. It was the perfect time for my indecisive soul to catch my attention.
It reminded me that, after all, not everything was all right: I missed the natural science subjects. I solved my problem by consulting the long list of interesting degree programmes that the University of Vienna offers. I settled for the bachelor’s programme in Biology. The combination of transcultural communication and biology seems incompatible, but for me it became an everyday reality. Again, I had this freshman feeling, including the stressful phase before the STEOP exams, the flood of definitions and the innumerable pages of notes. Since then, a year has passed, and I am now doing the bachelor’s programmes both in Transcultural Communication and in Biology.
Too much text analysis? No problem, exercises in genetics provide variety. Whether I will be interpreting at a conference on molecular biology or researching this topic in a multicultural team, competences that I have acquired once will not get lost and will certainly serve me well in my future career. My magic word is interdisciplinarity.” – Ludmila Peterková
Ludmila is studying Transcultural Communication and Biology at the University of Vienna.
