Physics studies are improving again. Encounter with Harald Lesch. No more BAföG.

In the winter semester of 2015, I successfully completed the first semester, recharged with fresh energy and thanks to the collaboration and exchange with my fellow students, and passed all my exams at the first attempt.

The highlight of the semester was an evening lecture by Harald Lesch at our university. Back in the sixth form, I used to watch Alpha Centauri at lunch after school, where Mr. Lesch presented lots of exciting facts about the origin of the universe and the cosmos. I was a big fan of his, so I was all the more pleased to be able to experience him live for the first time. His lecture gave me a boost of motivation for the next semester. I asked a woman after the lecture if she could take a photo of Harald Lesch and me. February 2015.

I also passed all the required modules in the summer semester. Of course, it was very stressful having to hand in several challenging exercise sheets every week. But I also met up diligently with the others in the second semester to master the tasks together. Working in a team at university was the key to my success.

Future learning from restarting my studies: If I were to start studying physics or a similarly demanding subject from scratch, I would always team up with other students to survive the foundation course. Walk with Jule at the cemetery, while Scilla blooms in Hannover. April 2016.

During the summer semester break, I received a letter from the student union saying that I would no longer receive BAföG because I had not completed all the necessary coursework within the first four semesters. I was very upset by this news because I was dependent on BAföG to pay for my coursework, books and other university expenses. I therefore wrote a letter to the administrator to explain to her that I had been in a difficult phase of my life in the first two semesters and was therefore unable to pass any modules. I asked her not to cancel the BAföG because I didn't want to stop studying physics because of this. But, as the case worker told me, my letter was useless without an official certificate from the doctor. From the next month, I no longer received BAföG.

In order to be able to pay the upcoming tuition fee of four hundred euros for the coming semester, I called on visitors to my website to help me. In the meantime, I had converted my website into a pure physics website and added a lot of new physics content. As a result, I reached an average of eighty thousand visitors a month from Google alone, while my YouTube channel had over ten thousand subscribers.

In a diary entry, I reflected on my situation: what if I hadn't had the support from the previous donations? What if I hadn't been allowed to live with my mother during my studies? Then I would have been forced to work at the supermarket checkout alongside my studies or create websites for other people. For some subjects, you would certainly have time for that on the side. But how could I have managed such a demanding subject as physics if I had to spend half my day earning money to study and survive? I certainly wasn't in a position to do so.

One thing was certain: in order to receive BAföG, my parents had to earn a little. My mother was already doing that. But I also had to be emotionally stable and do everything right from the start in order to complete the benefits on time. I had probably failed on this point. If I wasn't able to get the money for the tuition fees together in time, I would be exmatriculated in the middle of my studies.

The worry of not being able to pay the next tuition fee and thus being de-registered made me invest more time in my website in order to hopefully increase the income from donations. I definitely didn't want to work at the supermarket checkout or stock shelves there, even though it would have been very helpful financially at the time. I wanted to do work that I wasn't just doing to earn money, but that also seemed meaningful to me. And my work on the website felt very meaningful because I was helping thousands of students. Many physics teachers also wrote me emails and asked me if they could use my self-drawn illustrations in class, for example. Unfortunately, their gratitude was not enough for me to lead a financially carefree life.

Then I continued the situation in a diary entry with a thought experiment: Imagine a world in which all footballers disappeared from one day to the next. In this world, people would now have to entertain themselves with other things, with basketball, books or television. Now imagine another world in which all refuse collectors boycotted their work from one day to the next. All the streets would be flooded with garbage because no one would dispose of it. All the big cities would descend into chaos.

The work of a garbage collector is more essential to the existence of our civilization than the work of a professional footballer. However, a professional footballer is paid millions, while a garbage collector earns many orders of magnitude less, even though he performs work that is more relevant to society than a footballer. Even if the garbage collector worked twenty-four hours a day without breaks, he would not even come close to the salary of a good footballer.

So there was little point in working twenty-four hours a day on the website during the semester break, creating free and ad-free content. Even if, according to the emails and comments, I was doing important work, it was not directly linked to a leap into a financially carefree life, as in the case of a garbage collector.

This realization led me to go against my principle of "free, ad-free knowledge for all" and place ads on my website in order to generate revenue to pay for my tuition fees.

Continue Reading