Tübingen/South Africa is a cultural and language program for South African students initiated by the eastern Seaboard Association of Tertiary Institutions and the University of Tübingen, aiming to expose students to German culture and to bring about closer ties and understanding between the two countries. Students spend a month in Tübingen in a program designed to provide a broad spectrum of knowledge in a wide variety of subjects, from language to history to economics, punctuated by a number of leisure activities, which makes for an exciting month of multi-faceted learning.

Message to the participants

Welcome to Tübingen! Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen is proud to present its "Summer Program" for South African Students to you for the seventh time in January 2006. Originally with the assistance of esATI, the Eastern Seabord Association of Tertiary Institutions, we have been able to offer a highly successful program to students from the partner provinces of Baden-Württemberg in 2000 and 2001, while the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) provided stipends for one fifth of the participants. In 2002, all of the participants were DAAD grantees. From 2003 on we went back to the original format, and last year, for the first time, DaimlerChrysler South Africa has generously agreed to cosponsor our program by providing travel grants to all participants, and is sending two of their working students. This year we are having a record attendance of 23 again, as in 2005. The coordinating and leadership role in South Africa has meanwhile passed from one end of the country to the other, from esATI to the University of Stellenbosch and we are grateful to our colleagues at the Western Cape for having shouldered this responsibility.

Among the many South African activities of Eberhard Karls Universität this is certainly the most ambitious one. Well over one hundred students from Universities and Technikons in South Africa have benefited from our program, and we have been able to reconvene the former participants in two memorable alumni meetings at the Western Cape in 2003 and 2004. I am confident that you will enjoy and profit from "Tübingen 2006" just as much as your predecessors. Our enthusiastic and experienced team has put together another exciting schedule for you. You will find that things are quite different here in Germany, and that these differences do not only apply to the climate and the food! I wish you all a very successful program here in Tübingen, and I hope that we all will see each other again when we are organizing another alumni meeting in your country - which may not be too far off.

With my best wishes,

     Axel Markert

Director, International Relations