For me, the University of Fribourg is...

a project.

Why did you choose the University of Fribourg?

Coming from the Lake Constance area, I got my first impressions of Fribourg during my basic military training (at that time it was still in the ‘Matten’ barracks in the old part of town). These impressions can’t have been all that bad. Years later, when every week I had to travel back and forth by train from my home in Switzerland to a German university, the opportunity arose to need only a bicycle to get to work. And I’ve been enjoying doing just that for more than seven years now, every day.

What do you appreciate most about your work at the Uni?

In general, I’d like to mention the easy and friendly communication with people across language borders: among colleagues, when working together with the University administration and in my contact with students. In researching, teaching and further education in my area of specialisation, the management of associations and other non-profit organisations, I have found my own personal calling.

What reasons would you give someone for recommending that they take up a position at the University of Fribourg?

This university still retains something of the entrepreneurial spirit of its founder, Georges Python. With limited resources, he made a visionary idea reality and in doing so gave an important impetus to a comparatively small city and a not very well-off region. For anyone coming to our University today, conditions are far easier, but perhaps more than at other Swiss universities, we here in Fribourg are called upon to organise ourselves entrepreneurially in order to make the ideas of our time reality. Because of this, the University allows the individual more latitude in being an entrepreneurial researcher. In a university world characterised by a latent tendency toward more and more bureaucratisation, this would seem to me to be a good reason.