Normal everyday student life is monotonous: in lectures you listen and let yourself be sprinkled, in seminars the same, with the difference that you say something now and then, in between the time is killed in the library.
Lunch is served in the canteen and, if it is available, dinner as well.
Occasionally there is a panel discussion or the debate in the pub afterwards.
Information, knowledge, technical terms, models, studies - it's easy to get lost between the lines and in the swamp of your own thoughts.
In order to get out of there again, the head simply has to be switched off.
The ethics of the existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre can be summed up as an invitation to “Get involved!”.
This is how you create value and your own essence.
Experience confirms it: Acting in the world gives meaning to life.
Political, social, green commitment
The most popular, and most talked about, is involvement in the climate justice movement.
Students for Future is an example where the student element is already recognizable in the name.
There are also other (political) organizations outside of the university area: parties, trade unions, local associations.
But you can also get involved within the university – both artistically and politically.
In the Asta (General Student Committee) and student parliament or in the student council, which exists in some East German universities and which combines both.
Here you can debate and fight for the improvement of the student situation, because the student body is organized and their interests are represented to the university management or the federal state.
They are also partly the ones who finance university media.
It was not until September that university newspapers and radio stations from all over Germany came together for the Campus Media Days in Jena to attend workshops, to criticize one another and to network.
The necessary small change, the organization, the brain power - everything came from students.
Involvement in university media
The publication of a newspaper serves to inform about decisions of the university management or about changes in the institutes, be it in interviews with the president or in the case of professorships.
The city's student culture can also play a role when events take place or committed students take the initiative themselves by running entrepreneurship or cultural centers where people meet for coffee in the afternoon and music in the evening.
In addition, the goings-on in the university politics already mentioned can be critically examined.
The symbiosis of both, i.e. student politics and student press, has the purpose of shaping the common living environment.
Only in this way does the time during your studies become one of self-determination and self-efficacy.