Dennis Feiks

Following my vocational high-school diploma in business administration and subsequent vocational training as a wholesale and export assistant at a Cologne structural engineering sales organisation, I realised that my fascination with foreign languages was stronger than my desire to continue working on the commercial side of industry. One clear sign of this was the fact that during my training it was the correspondence with English-speaking clients in Europe and Hong Kong that interested me in particular and that – apart from my training manager – I was the only person at the company able to take on this task.

So, it seemed only natural that, following a brief decision-making phase, I embarked on my studies at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences in late summer 2002, with the aim of graduating as a certified translator for English and French. Among other things, my studies comprised a semester in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France and a five-month internship in the “technical documentation” department of a Bonn-based electrical engineering company.