Corinna Jacke studied Art & Cultural Management and graduated in 2015. Since then she has been working as Head of Content for the startup “Rausgegangen” in Cologne.

What are you doing now?

Right now, it’s a quite an exciting time for me to write about my current job at Rausgegangen, because being on the market for one year now, we just launched our crowdfunding campaign on startnext. We are more than thankful for every support we get.

On the page, there is all information about what we do and why, also in form of a nice video, but I’ll summarize the core here again. Also you can find nice goodies – for users, like bags, concerts and festival tickets, and for companies, like the possibility to be featured in our app.

Basically, Rausgegangen is an app, a newsletter, a website and a facebook page, that everyday recommends 4 tips on what to do in the of city Cologne. It can be anything from small concerts, exhibitions, flea markets, movies and nice cafés up to the party on a Saturday. In doing so, we are completely independent and just chose events upon the premise that we would recommend them to our best friends. Our tips aren’t for sale. For each recommendation we write our own texts, contact the organizers of the events, often get some free tickets for our users and in general work closely together with the local event organizer scene. My position here as head of content includes the final selection of the events we feature each day, the coordination of the content with our interns and working students and the final check of everything before it gets out there to our over 60.000 followers.

With our app, we even went one step further: we want to connect people and provide a chat feature (iOS) so people whose friends don’t have much time wouldn’t end up sitting home alone instead of attending an event. For each of our recommendations, you can get in a chat with 3 other users and meet up at the event.

But there is more. Being a bunch of creative people ourselves we from time to time create our own events, like a monthly concert in an old saloon carriage from the 30ies with only an audience of 7 people, or once a year our Rausgegangen festival “zusammen leuchten” where we bring together the highlights of incredible musicians, artists and people we see over the course of one year. Concerning my tasks, next to the content work I’m in charge of organizing these events, which is what I like doing a lot. I would have never thought of being able to organize my own festival just one year after graduating – one of the benefits of working at a startup project, where you can really influence the course things take.

As I said, we really appreciate if you visit our campaign website and, of course, are grateful for every support – whether it’s actual financial support or the sharing of the page or video. Thank you.

How do you rethink and redo management in your everyday business live? 

Since we are quite a young team which is growing and also changing from time to time, the most important part I often see ourselves confronted with is to find a way of efficient communication. That together with the very flat hierarchies we work with is a challenge to assign clear tasks and at the same time exclude nobody from important processes that might take place outside the frame of these tasks. But I think we’re doing our best to make things work and to learn from the experiences we make every day in order to step by step refine and establish the right tools and structures within our little company.

From your perspective, what is the Karls about?

My first thoughts about this question go straight to the kind of family-like atmosphere atthe Karls. That you know a lot more people than just those from your own program, that you can exchange and work on ideas with people coming from different backgrounds and that also the relations towards the professors and lecturers fall within this atmosphere – it’s always possible to find someone who can help with whatever you’re working on.

What are you missing when you think about the Karls?

What I really liked was that in addition to a steady amount of exchange between study programs and students in general mentioned above, there were also at all times a lot of international influences. This really brought a lot of interesting people and ideas together and I think to some parts gave the Karls its lively spirit.

Was there a special moment at the Karls you would like to share with us?

During my time at the Karls, some of my fellow students and I founded the KarlsKonzerte e.V., a club dedicated to organizing concerts. I still remember when we did the first show all on our own and the satisfaction I felt that evening standing there and seeing all the happy people in the crowd and the musicians also having a good time on stage – this very moment wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for us who organized it. And this is the exact same feeling I have now every time one of my own organized concerts or events takes places. I love it.

Back to the future – If you were a freshman again, what would be important to you?

I remember that I had some trouble getting a hang on the lot of management modules that took place in the first semesters, which left me in a place not quite knowing what I was doing in cultural management because the cultural modules would take place later on. I think it would be important for me to know that in the end everything falls into place – for example, it wasn’t until I had to write my first paper in the 3^rd semester that I really valued the things we learned in the WISS module covering research topics.

What would be your advice to a current student? Which nutshell needs to be cracked?

I would say just embrace the openness! On several levels – just get in touch with the many different and interesting people around you and have a look at what is going on beside your own studies, beside your own program – event if it’s just by looking through the glass walls ;-)