Hector Andrade Loarca,  
BMS Phase I student, 
BSc National Autonomous University of Mexico

In the summer of 2014, I was invited to come to the BMS for the BMS Summer School in Applied Analysis in Materials, and this great experience convinced me that I wanted to be part of the BMS family. I have two important reasons for this:

1. Berlin offers a lot of options to people who want to do mathematics, including three of the best universities in Germany (TU, FU and HU) and research centers of a very high level (e.g. WIAS, Fraunhofer). The BMS gives international students the means to use these opportunities in a comfortable and rich atmosphere, offering a lot of help with bureaucracy, and a mentoring program that provides you with the advice of a professor close to your academic interests who will help you create your academic path (I have not heard of other programs with the same features).

2. Berlin is a vibrant city with a huge variety of cultural offers, maybe the biggest in Europe, and it is also a very friendly place for foreigners since it is a meeting point of so many cultures from all around the world (you can hear a new language on public transport every day). It is also a very affordable place for students, since the prices of food and accommodation are low in comparison with other European capital cities.

I've been in Phase I of the BMS for one and a half years already and so far I am very satisfied about my decision. I've met so many nice and very smart people either in the common BMS student areas like the BMS lounge, at the BMS Fridays or in the activities that the student representatives have organized through the years. The BMS One-Stop Office is always there to help the students with organizational problems and to inform the students of different options about summer schools, soft-skills seminars and other academic activities, and they are always kind and eager to help us.

After my experience here, I decided to become a student representative to take part in the BMS at an organizational level, either by attending the BMS Board Meetings where important decisions about the present and the future of the program are made, and also by organizing fun activities to make the students' lives easier and give them a framework to know each other in a more relaxed atmosphere. I am sure that I want to continue with Phase II here, working in Applied Functional Analysis in the group of Professor Gitta Kutyniok at TU Berlin.

 Published in the end of February 2017

Update 2018: Hector did his Qualifying Exam and finished his Master Thesis in 2017 and is Phase II student in the group of Gitta Kutyniok.