A A-levels can help, but other qualities often count: Anyone aiming for a scholarship should take a close look at the profiles of the various funding organizations. In this series we present scholarship holders from various foundations.
Anyone applying for a Heinrich Böll Foundation scholarship does not have to be a member of the Greens.
The same applies to the FDP-affiliated Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.
Many of the scholarship holders are still involved in one of the two parties.
Kimberly Schlueter is one of them.
She sits for the Greens in the city parliament of Mörfelden-Walldorf and in the district council of Groß-Gerau.
Viola Gebek from the FDP is a member of the Flörsheim city parliament.
Schlueter studied sociology in Mainz, Gebek studies Sustainable Marketing and Leadership in Wiesbaden.
Both were previously hardly interested in politics.
Today they are discussing daycare places or have to assert themselves against veteran party colleagues in parliament.
Gebek says of herself that she doesn't fulfill the FDP cliché of a child from a wealthy, liberal family.
She found her way to the party through its values such as openness, diversity and the right to free development.
In addition to what Gebek associates with the FDP in terms of values, there is also what she learned in the advanced history course.
"It made me realize how important it is to protect liberal democracies." The student feels more European than German, speaks French and has friends across the continent.
Politics, especially local politics, was largely irrelevant to her for a long time.
"I didn't even know how to get involved locally," says Gebek.
With the onset of the pandemic, she begins to think more about her relationship to politics.
She found herself best with the Young Liberals, says the student.
Her scholarship from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation enabled her to start her master's degree at the private Fresenius University in Wiesbaden.
The foundation currently supports around 1100 students and doctoral candidates.
"Somehow I always found parties a bit unsexy," says Kimberly Schlueter, known as Kimi.
She defines herself as non-binary, but with her consent the feminine pronouns are to be used here.
Schlueter, 22 years old, lives with her partner.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation has been funding them since 2018. The funding agency supports around 1400 students and doctoral candidates every year.
“It took me until the tenth grade to even understand what politics meant.
That's when I started reading newspapers and became interested in literature.
Literature really politicized me,” says Schlueter.
She can talk herself into a rage when she talks about novels that have stuck in her memory.
Especially when it comes to the fates of women who perish due to social constraints.
It had become clear to her that even today there are no equal opportunities, no opportunities for everyone to participate.
"I want to change that."