Unpredictable

Growing up in the middle of Munich in an apartment building, Nicolas Bühringer felt neither analyzed nor influenced, even though his father is a psychology professor. "Instead, my parents gave me all the freedom I needed to enjoy a carefree and carefree childhood and youth." Back then, he was more of a spontaneous city dweller who lived for the day without thinking much beyond it. It was mainly in sport that a certain ambition became apparent: Spurred on by an ex-professional basketball player who became a secondary school teacher after his career, Nicolas Bühringer played basketball for several years until an inflammation of his knee joint put him out of action for months. Unlike excuses, he then lacked the motivation to get back into sport - apart from a casual run, his sporting spirit was dormant.

Nicolas Bühringer only showed more commitment towards the upper school. Once again motivated by a teacher, his interest in social and political issues grew to such an extent that he not only followed current affairs more closely, but also helped organize a "Day for Europe" at his school. But this interest alone did not stop there: "At some point, I was interested in just about everything, which only made choosing a course of study all the more difficult the closer I got to my Abitur," says Bühringer. As a result, he took the time he needed to decide what to do next and took a gap year after leaving school. After a job at a department store checkout, he completed an internship in the Berlin office of SPD MP Martin Gerster. "As the SPE bachelor's degree at ZU was already on the horizon, the internship in the Bundestag was just the right time to experience political work in practice," explains Bühringer.

Shortly before the coronavirus outbreak, Nicolas Bühringer got to know the university and its people in person. "Above all, I was surprised by the friendly, almost familiar atmosphere," reports Bühringer, "which was also reflected in the fact that the student vice president at the time, Hannes Werning, took me to the city station after the selection day."

It was also the coronavirus pandemic that led Nicolas Bühringer to a groundbreaking rethink. "Instead of backpacking through South America, I took part in the online programming course 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python', which was anything but boring and was incredibly fun," says Bühringer, who had to admit to himself at the beginning of his studies that sociological and political theories weren't for him. This realization led him to switch from SPE to CME. Before continuing his studies with a CME bachelor's degree, he attended a ten-week full-time data science bootcamp in Berlin. "This bootcamp was the turning point in my career," emphasizes Bühringer. "I discovered the topics that were to accompany me from then on, such as data management or machine and deep learning."

One programming language used at ZU for statistical and data analysis is R. "Thanks to my programming skills, I found it relatively easy to work with R," notes Bühringer. This also caught the eye of course instructor Professor Dr. Franziska Peter in a methods course, which in turn made him a tutor for the "Advanced Statistics", "Applied Statistics with R" and "Data Science" courses. "For me, the tutorials were not just an opportunity to expand my own skills. They were also a chance to familiarize my fellow students with a programming language," explains Bühringer, who was also actively involved in other aspects of student and university life as the event and initiative director of the Student Lounge e.V. and as the second chairman of university sports.

In order to deepen his knowledge of data science and statistics, Nicolas Bühringer spent two semesters abroad in his sixth and seventh semesters. First, he went to the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. There he attended exclusively quantitative courses on data structures and algorithms, among other things. "The good thing about this university was that I had a free choice of courses," notes Bühringer. The situation was very different at the University of California, Berkeley, where existing students have priority when choosing courses, meaning that courses on data science or computer science, which are in high demand, are fully booked early. "That was a shame, but it didn't matter because it gave me the opportunity to explore new horizons," explains Bühringer. "And the courses on mathematics, astronomy and bioengineering were the best I've ever attended. The standard of the lecturers and students is at an incredibly high level, which spurs you on and allows you to surpass yourself at the same time."

Nicolas Bühringer knows what it feels like to overcome your own limits. "It all started with a documentary about the Ironman Hawaii," says Bühringer. From then on, he couldn't shake off the attraction of achieving the impossible. Plagued by knee problems during his first semester break in Berlin, he dared to jump into the pool of a nearby outdoor swimming pool after watching two YouTube tutorials on crawl style - with the aim of swimming one kilometer at a time. Although completely exhausted afterwards, he didn't let up, so that after the summer he stayed under the time required to swim half an Ironman - 1.9 kilometers in under 1 hour and 10 minutes.