The fuller the tram, the more comfortable Laura von Burski feels.

Dense crowd after work, screaming soccer people on the weekend.

"Does not matter.

The main thing is that there is something going on, ”says von Burski.

The student will always have her place anyway.

For almost three years she has been at the front of the controls on the 45-meter-long tram.

The 25-year-old is one of more than 20 student tram drivers at the Dresden Transport Company (DVB).

At half past three in the morning, when the night of the party is over for the last ones and the working day begins for the first, she rattles the tram through Dresden. With the line 7 past the main station, then on over the Elbe. If you look to the left at the right time, you can catch a glimpse of the spire of the Frauenkirche on the way. From Burski passes the bars of the hip Neustadt to Weixdorf, where there is a farm with 300 cows, woolly pigs and a flock of sheep. “This is my favorite track,” says von Burski. "I used to be able to see from the driver's cab whether I had watered the flowers in my apartment."

The journey from end station to end station takes an hour and two minutes - if everything goes smoothly.

Garbage trucks that maneuver in the track bed can be a brake in the early morning.

Later in the day, other things jeopardize the on-time arrival.

The classic: passengers crowding around a door, blocking light barriers instead of going through.

For these moments, the student has prepared an announcement: "The train is not an advent calendar, here you can open more than one door at the same time."

Driving the tram as a popular part-time job

There are students who draw beer and mix long drinks. Others are clearing supermarket shelves and dragging barcodes across the checkout belt. Still others assist their professors. Statistically speaking, they outnumber them. Temporary jobs in gastronomy, retail and at your own university are among the most popular part-time jobs among students. But take a tram? Right at the front, not as a ticket inspector in the rocking compartment, but as a chauffeur with responsibility for up to 200 standing and seated passengers?

For a long time, Dresden was the only location that relied on tram drivers from the lecture hall.

But meanwhile other cities have followed suit.

With the slogan “Magdeburg's coolest student job?

Tram driver! ”The transport company in Saxony-Anhalt's state capital is recruiting new staff.

Temporary drivers supported the company as early as the GDR era, and they want to continue this tradition.

Students in Potsdam, Augsburg, Heidelberg and Frankfurt am Main also sit in the driver's cab.

Living mobility concepts, also in order to improve

Like Laura von Burski, the vast majority of temporary drivers in Dresden study traffic sciences at the Technical University (TU), even if that is not a requirement for the part-time job. With six courses and more than 1000 students, the faculty is Germany's largest chair for traffic sciences. Von Burski, the only woman on the Dresden student team, applied for the job as a tram driver in the first semester. “We learn in the university seminars that a traffic light has to switch so and so on average. But is that even feasible? I don't want to complain about delays at my desk, I want to gain my own experience, ”she says. After completing her studies, she would like to work on mobility concepts and advocate for traffic-calmed inner cities.

Anyone wishing to work as a tram driver must be at least 21 years old and have a class B driver's license, i.e. a conventional car driver's license. Many transport companies also require applicants to be enrolled at a university for at least two years. Because once they have learned it, the students should do the job in the tram for as long as possible. Before they can hit the tracks, they have to complete several weeks of training followed by an examination.