Anna Piasecka

She also had to stand on her own two feet financially. She found work on the assembly line of a global mobile phone manufacturer located in the city. Along with numerous other foreign students, she was able to work in the factory for the maximum permitted period of six to eight nights per month. It is at this point, if not before, that students reading Piasecka’s book will realise that there is a lot more to studying abroad than just a light-hearted student life. But that was not all. Business English was on the timetable and Anna had to tackle it without prior knowledge of English and with even more chutzpah. She only managed to compensate for this deficit years later when she took a three-month intensive course in business English at a college in London.

By chance and quite unprepared she witnessed a dramatic event in global politics. On the night before Poland became a member of the European Union on 1 May 2004, she was once again in the bus to Poland waiting at the border of the despised passport and customs control. After hours of waiting, at midnight the bus was simply waved through. Cheering broke out. From this point onwards, residence and work permits were no longer required in Germany. Anna found a new temporary job, completed her intermediate diploma, carried out her internship semesters at a drug store on a well known island in the North Sea, and finally finished her studies. She is one of only three graduates to have managed to do that in the standard study period.

The young woman stayed in Germany. She found her first job with an agricultural company, also in northern Germany, which had a Polish subsidiary. She was offered her second and more significant job by an agribusiness which was pursuing a joint venture with a Polish agricultural trade business. Piasecka was sent to Poland for a few years to get the project off the ground and to merge the two companies. At this juncture, under the chapter heading “Project Poland”, Piasecka’s essay becomes a work of non-fiction which provides information about a typical career outline from the field of International Management and which can be used as specialist reading material for students. The author reports on intercultural problems, the completely new view of the country where she came from, on different work mentalities and consequent changes to the personnel and organisational structure of the Polish company, the drafting of articles of association, communication in two languages which she had to manage single-handedly for the entire company, the different legal and administrative systems in both countries, the training of employees and the development of a new distribution system in Poland, and finally on the introduction of modern forms of controlling and reporting. However, she describes everything so clearly and intelligibly that non-technical readers can still enjoy it.