Dyuthi Pramoth had always known she wanted to write. What the English literature student didn’t know was that moving to Germany would mean learning how to speak.
Raised in Kerala, in the south of India, Dyuthi built a career around words long before she left home. She completed a bachelor’s and master’s in English language and literature, then worked as a creative content writer, including two years contributing to Girl Up Gleam, a regional arm of a UN women’s empowerment campaign.
“I really loved writing content, spreading awareness, talking about other people’s stories,” she says. Content writing felt like a natural next step — a way to keep writing and get paid for it.
Then she heard about Germany’s tuition-free public universities, and the promise of free tuition appealed to her instincts.
She wouldn’t need to show as much money to enrol as she would for other countries — and she wasn’t willing to spend a fortune to study abroad. She applied, fought her family on the decision, and got in.
She’s now studying North American Studies (a culture and literature course) at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, drawn to it after years steeped in American and postcolonial literature during her bachelor’s and master’s back home. The plan: specialise, go deep, and eventually pursue a PhD.
Studying in Germany may be free — but not easy
Becoming an international student in Germany wasn’t simple.
Visa delays meant she missed several weeks of classes, and she arrived to a system that bore little resemblance to what she’d known. German universities run on student portals — plural — and nobody had taught her how to navigate them.
“I don’t know which one to go to for what,” the English literature student says. Despite calling herself an extroverted, cheerful person, she struggled to get help, stopped attending classes, and wrote off her first semester as a failure.
The deeper issue wasn’t just logistics, though. It was the culture.
In the Indian classrooms she’d grown up in, the teacher’s answer was the only right one — disagreement wasn’t invited, and voicing a different opinion risked being seen as arrogant. She’d absorbed that lesson so thoroughly that when German professors asked for her opinion, she didn’t know what to do with the invitation.
It took her a full semester to realise that in her field, differing readings weren’t a liability. They were the whole point.
By her second semester, she’d decided to fight through it. She started speaking up in every discussion, and the shift transformed her experience entirely. Her professors, once intimidating, became close allies. The PhD ambition she’d nearly shelved came roaring back.
A new way of learning English literature
Academically, the adjustment ran deeper than classroom participation. Where her Indian degrees had focused on primary texts, her German programme leaned hard into critical theory and secondary scholarship, pushing her towards research at what she describes as near-PhD intensity.
Academic writing itself had to be relearned from scratch. The English literature lover had arrived confident, having earned strong marks and praise on her Indian thesis. Her German professor disagreed — kindly, but thoroughly, walking her through everything from citation conventions to word choice. It reshaped how she thinks. “Ever since, I have loved writing papers,” she says. “I’m on top. I would just love writing it.”
The financial and bureaucratic path to get there was its own trial. As an Indian applicant, she needed an APS certificate verifying her academic credentials — a process that took her four months, and up to nine for some peers. S
She had one week to sit her IELTS exam, had to convert her Indian percentage grades into Germany’s one-to-five scale, and needed to prove roughly 11,000 euros (around US$12,730) in a blocked account to secure her visa.
Some universities demanded German proficiency even for English-taught programmes, though Dyuthi got away without.
Now quite settled there, Dyuthi is studying German through free university courses, though she claims that she’s still pretty bad.
Her advice for the students who’ll follow her: however much research you do alone, connections matter, and asking for help early isn’t a weakness. It’s what she wishes someone had told her in that first, difficult semester.
That, and maybe pick up a little more German before you head over to the country.
