Three and a half questions with Cornelia Woll in DIE ZEIT

In her answers to DIE ZEIT’s famous three and a half questions from 16 June 2022, Hertie School President Cornelia Woll provides a personal insight on her experiences in academia. The Professor of International Political Economy shares insights on higher education management, her experience as a student at US vs. French and German institutions, as well as what she has been reading.

What skills do you need in your job today that you did not learn during your studies?

Being able to delegate. My studies in political science gave me limited exposure to teams where efficiency and division of labour were important. Management experience at the university usually meant supervising doctoral students. Researchers often want to work through problems by themselves and seldom trust others’ proposed solutions. Only when I started working in university administration did I learn to share responsibility, to hand over work and not to want to answer every question.
 

What did you find particularly impressive during your studies abroad?

I started my studies at the University of Chicago and was very impressed by the closeness between professors and students there. Even as freshmen we could talk to Nobel Prize laureates about anything. It was normal to catch up on course content during professors’ office hours. In France, professors often don’t even have an office where they can receive students. And at German universities, there is usually not enough time for that kind of intensive supervision.
 

Reading is a must. What genres do you like?

I like to read heavily researched work on economic scandals or on the rise and fall of companies. I recommend John Preston's Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell or Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family. However, I often need several days off to really immerse myself in the reading and leave work behind me.
 

And what else is new?

... after coming from Paris, I'm still getting used to the short lunch breaks in Germany. A two-hour lunch break is rare here, but in France it's everyday life!

Read the original interview (in German) in the latest print edition of DIE ZEIT from 16 June 2022 or in the ZEIT ONLINE newsletter Wissen3. The text above is an English translation.

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