Youth & Economics – Vienna Meets London

Published on April 17, 2013

Vienna

Ste­fan Nikolic is a Ser­bian stu­dent, cur­rently fin­ish­ing his Bach­e­lor of Arts in In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions at Hult In­ter­na­tional Busi­ness School in Lon­don. How­ever, he is also closely con­nected to Vi­enna, a city that is even one of his op­tions for mas­ter stud­ies.

Hi Stef… tell us, what made you de­cide to study abroad? When I de­cided to come to Lon­don for my bach­e­lor stud­ies three years ago it was mostly due to the eco­nomic rea­sons, be­cause I would have not been able to af­ford study­ing and make a de­cent liv­ing in Ser­bia. I wanted some­thing more than a reg­u­lar rou­tine-like life of a Ser­bian stu­dent – I wanted to travel, in­ter­act with some lead­ing fig­ures of my study­ing field, have a job or an in­tern­ship, be sur­rounded by in­ter­na­tional stu­dents… things that might gen­er­ally be nat­ural to most of the West­ern-Eu­ro­pean stu­dents, but which are still quite ab­stract is­sues to Ser­bian con­di­tions.

Ok, so it was “The West” that you were striv­ing for. Why UK as a final choice? Ac­tu­ally, first I was ap­ply­ing to the United States but I changed my mind, since it was im­pos­si­ble for me to fi­nance it, and Eu­rope is some­thing I con­sider home. In Ser­bia it is quite dif­fi­cult to get a credit or a loan to fi­nance your stud­ies or a schol­ar­ship to start your stud­ies abroad and since it is a “third world” coun­try, all study fees are usu­ally dou­bled. Even­tu­ally I found a uni­ver­sity in Lon­don, or dare I say it found me, that was more or less af­ford­able for me.

And when you speak about eco­nomic rea­sons that mo­ti­vated you to go to the UK, what ex­actly do you have in mind? Fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion can some­times be a very rel­a­tive term, de­pend­ing a lot from a so­cial back­ground and one´s na­tion­al­ity. The un­em­ploy­ment rate in Ser­bia is very high and liv­ing stan­dard low. For ex­am­ple, both of my par­ents are un­em­ployed, I de­pend on my grand­mother´s pen­sion, which isn´t re­ally much – ap­prox­i­mately 200 euros a month. So of course, I have to work a lot and man­age my bud­get wisely if I want to es­cape ex­is­ten­tial dif­fi­cul­ties. High ed­u­cated peo­ple, even PhD grad­u­ates ex­pe­ri­ence many dif­fi­cul­ties when try­ing to find a job and often work for low money that is way be­yond their qual­i­fi­ca­tions. For stu­dents for ex­am­ple it is quite im­pos­si­ble to find a part-time job, while on the other hand, find­ing one is some­thing very nor­mal in the UK.

What is your con­nec­tion to Ser­bia since you left? When you leave, the most im­por­tant thing that stays are some very per­sonal con­nec­tions. Had I not had that many lov­ing friends, fam­ily, mem­o­ries, I am not sure I would have ever wanted to go back. I am not say­ing I never con­sider com­ing back to Ser­bia and try to change things that ac­tu­ally made me leave. Even though Ser­bia has not been able to pro­vide qual­ity of life for me when I lived there, it gave me knowl­edge, ex­pe­ri­ence, taught me how to deal with dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions and have a some­what dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than reg­u­lar stu­dents in the UK…I trea­sure that a lot. If I ever had an op­por­tu­nity to share my ex­pe­ri­ence with youth in Ser­bia, to in­spire them to have courage, be­lieve and de­velop, I would be more than happy to take it.

As for Lon­don – was it dif­fi­cult for you to de­cide to go there? To be hon­est, in the first place I was afraid to go to Lon­don. The US was my first choice, I had spent a year there as a high school stu­dent, it had been al­ready fa­mil­iar and I was re­ally dis­ap­pointed when I re­al­ized, it would not be pos­si­ble for me to go there. How­ever, a pos­i­tive thing about Lon­don was that it was in an Eng­lish speak­ing coun­try as a cap­i­tal of the Eng­lish state, as a mat­ter of fact. Some of my friends had al­ready started their stud­ies in Vi­enna, Ger­many, Italy, the US, and I knew the trou­bles they had been through to learn the lan­guage.. It is some­what ironic that be­cause of eco­nomic rea­sons I came to study in one of the most ex­pen­sive cities in the world, but you know what – some­times you have to do bizarre things and have faith in your­self in order to find your own way.

Is there any funny story from your life in Lon­don that you would like to share? Def­i­nitely so! I could tell you ac­tu­ally about my first day in Lon­don. I didn’t re­ally know where I was going to live… I just packed my suit­case, which was around 30kg and fell apart while on the air­plane, so I had to drag it around Lon­don…When I came from Heathrow to the cen­tral Lon­don, the main idea and mis­sion was to find where I was going to sleep that night. I didn’t know any­one and had no clue the struc­ture of the city. At first I stayed in some youth hos­tels, but cou­ple of days later I moved to Kens­ing­ton - I need to say that be­cause it in fact is the most posh area in Lon­don and it´s quite ironic that the first af­ford­able apart­ment I found was in that area.

Were there any cul­tural dif­fer­ences you had to ad­just to? Iron­i­cally, it was ac­tu­ally re­ally hard to adapt to the lan­guage. I know it sounds weird, I thought I knew Eng­lish very good when I came, but the ac­cent and slang are so dif­fer­ent, that some­times I re­ally didn´t have a clue what peo­ple were say­ing. I can­not imag­ine how dif­fi­cult it must be for stu­dents in Vi­enna, for ex­am­ple, who did not know Ger­man at all and had to adapt to all sorts of ac­cents. Speak­ing of the cul­ture, in Lon­don you can find every­thing from the whole world, it´s very live and in­ter­na­tional, you can eas­ily meet new peo­ple and I never had a feel­ing that I was dif­fer­ent be­cause I was a Ser­bian stu­dent. How­ever, what I find for ex­am­ple bizarre are peo­ple on the tube, es­pe­cially how they dress up. They don´t mind how the things they wear don´t re­ally go to­gether, or how ex­trav­a­gant or weird they are. Run­ning shoes and a suit, that´s my fa­vorite. I find it very in­ter­est­ing that peo­ple here don´t mind the style that much, it shows you that Lon­don is a huge city, where peo­ple sim­ply don´t care what oth­ers think about them.

When we speak about econ­omy and fi­nances – what do you think should be the role of money in young peo­ple´s lives? You know when you say money, I some­times think it is the biggest prob­lem world has, be­cause every­thing is de­pen­dent on money. You need money do to al­most any­thing you want. I don´t mean just pure shop­ping, I also mean cov­er­ing ex­is­ten­tial needs, hav­ing some sort of a stan­dard, in­vest­ing in ed­u­ca­tion… It all costs.. Some­times one´s tal­ent can­not be fully de­vel­oped be­cause of the money. I strongly be­lieve that money should be used for de­vel­op­ment of one­self, one´s in­tel­lect and one´s dreams. Un­for­tu­nately, it isn´t used in those ways, or at least not as much. Es­pe­cially here it´s all about busi­ness – even at uni­ver­sity a lot of my friends al­ready start their own com­pa­nies, we lit­er­ally learn how to make money and how to ex­ploit other peo­ple to get it and I think it is very wrong.

Now that you´re al­most fin­ished with you bach­e­lor, what are your plans for the fu­ture? I am def­i­nitely pe­rus­ing my ed­u­ca­tion fur­ther to do a mas­ter de­gree, pos­si­bly in Vi­enna at the Diplo­matic Acad­emy, but also I am plan­ning to de­velop an or­ga­ni­za­tion in Ser­bia with a goal to ed­u­cate young peo­ple and mo­ti­vate and in­spire them to take ac­tion in their lives and in their com­mu­ni­ties. I am plan­ning to de­velop a con­cept of non-profit and not-for-profit in peo­ple’s lives so they may act to ob­tain a happy stan­dard of liv­ing and thus make their com­mu­ni­ties bet­ter. Acad­e­mia and so­cial en­tre­pre­neur­ship is where I see my­self. Re­cently I had a chance to speak to Baroness Pa­tri­cia Scot­land of Asthal and she said that in­stead of set­ting a goal to be­come some­thing great in the fu­ture, one should focus on doing great things in pre­sent.

Thank you very much for this in­ter­view Ste­fan!

Thank you for the op­por­tu­nity!