FIM students’ social engagement

Since May 2015, the Social WG has been organ­ising the so-called “Lerncafé” at “Café Tür an Tür” every Sat­urday. Vol­un­teers and peo­ple with migra­tion back­ground meet for a two-hour tu­toring ses­sion in vari­ous school sub­jects, for­eign lan­guages or con­cern­ing their voca­tional train­ing. Addi­tional­ly, they sup­port “Bunter Kreis” by ar­rang­ing god­parenthoods for board games and tutor­ing, they organ­ise fund­rais­ings or help with the organ­isa­tion’s sum­mer par­ty.

When the Mayor of Augsburg, Dr. Kurt Gribl, read about the stu­dents' en­gagement in an article of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”, he praised the WG: "It is cer­tainly not a matter of course that stu­dents, who have to earn a living with jobs in addi­tion to their in­tense coursework, are also doing volun­teer work. This defi­nitely de­serves re­spect and high ap­preci­ation!”

In line with “Fri­days for Fu­ture”, the Envi­ron­men­tal WG visits schools in Augsburg to strengthen envi­ron­men­tal awareness of pupils from fifth to sev­enth grade. Dur­ing the last two se­mes­ters, the Envi­ron­men­tal WG has visit­ed 200 stu­dents to talk about the envi­ron­men­tal im­pact of their own be­havior and how they can im­prove their eco­logi­cal foot­print.

As a result, the WG en­coun­ters en­thusi­astic pupils as well as teach­ers: for ex­am­ple, they dis­cuss lively about vege­tarian nutri­tion or the reduc­tion of plastic waste and often im­ple­ment their ideas in­stant­ly by using reusa­ble drink­ing bot­tles and lunch box­es.

The FIM stu­dents also sup­port the “Werner-von-Sie­mens-Mit­telschule” in Augsburg. Once a week ninth-graders who are about to take their final exams have the op­por­tunity to attend the tutor­ing. To help that the pupils achieve the best grad­uation results as possi­ble, the stu­dents sup­port each pupil indi­vidu­ally with tutor­ing in all school sub­jects, but espe­cially in math­emat­ics.

Emil Julius Gum­bel (1891-1966) was a fa­mous statis­tician and is well-known due to the Gum­bel distri­bu­tion. How­ever, it is fairly un­known that the Ger­man-Ameri­can pro­fessor has also been a politi­cal publi­cist and paci­fist who re­volted against the Nazi dicta­tor­ship. Be­cause of his writ­ings about the legal bur­den of justice dur­ing the Wei­mar Re­pub­lic, which he was able to sub­stan­tiate with statis­tical re­search re­sults, he be­came a hat­ed critic of the re­gime.

The Gum­bel WG aims at re­call­ing the math­ema­ti­cian's com­mit­ment and in­forms about his life. In spring 2019, the WG orga­nized an exhi­bition on Gum­bel's work. A large part of this was the crea­tion of a digital copy of the "Eitelkeits­bücher" of the Leo Baeck Insti­tute in New York. In these books Gum­bel col­lected arti­cles about him­self in order to doc­ument his paci­fist and social activi­ties as well as other life events.

Text: Elite Graduate Program "Finance and Information Management"