German original translated:

Dear Students,

every year, I am delighted to share a few thoughts with you at the start of the academic win-ter semester. Especially if you are new to the HCU for your bachelor’s or master’s degree, a new chapter is beginning, a new step in the journey of your life. 

This year, I am writing to you while on a journey that has left a deep impression on me per-sonally. I am writing these lines in Montreal, Canada, at the end of September 2025, as part of a delegation trip with the First Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. I was very impressed by many things in Montreal. The city is colourful, modern, diverse, bilingual and cosmopolitan. The people are incredibly friendly and considerate of one another. Mon-treal is located on the St. Lawrence River and has a large harbour. And despite the parallels to Hamburg, the trip and my experiences here allow me to step out of my routine and gain new perspectives.

And that is precisely what we as a university would like to encourage you do time and again: to regularly step outside of your daily routine and thereby create space for curiosity, free-dom of thought and action, diversity and enjoyment of life, and the willingness to constantly embrace new things. Every day – even here in Hamburg – we can embark on such journeys, experience new adventures, discover new cultures and, above all, driven by our thirst for knowledge, gain some truly wonderful experiences. I sincerely hope that you will have such experiences as part of your studies.

In my opinion, our small HCU and Hamburg are ideal places for this. The HCU offers a broad, comprehensive and interdisciplinary space within a compact framework. And Hamburg, as a city-state, a metropolis and Germany’s second-largest city, is both our living space and a field for empirical research. 

I hope that Hamburg will be more than just a place of study for you. I hope that the city, with all its appeal and diversity, will offer you the opportunity to embark on an exciting journey of discovery. And for us, as part of this journey, I hope that our passion for what we do at HCU will inspire you in the long term and equip you with the right knowledge for the future.

You are living in very exciting times, but also times of crisis. At its core, however, there is also a new beginning: in my view, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are writing a whole new chapter in human history. Science, understood as the triad of research, teaching and transfer, is undergoing fundamental, even revolutionary change. We should respect this, but never fear it. Together, we can use AI to do many things better and shape the future, and we don’t have to become mere spectators of the actions of machines. On our delegation trip to Montreal, we also visited the world-famous MILA Institute to learn more about AI. And, as expected, North American scientists are asking themselves the same questions we are. I have been passionate about digital topics since my school days. What I learned in the pro-cess is that neither the spread of computers into every household, which Microsoft founder Bill Gates propagated very early on, nor the rapid spread of the internet in the late 1990s, nor even now the AI that permeates all areas of life, have made our lives worse.

AI has opened up opportunities that previous generations did not have. Research, science and academic exchange are the best ways to prepare for the future. Of course, all the topics that concern us at HCU are touched upon and influenced by AI – nevertheless, a high level of technical and interdisciplinary expertise remains the essential foundation of all our study programmemes. I can promise you today that your studies with us will go far beyond ChatGPT know-how, and I am delighted that you have more opportunities open to you and access to many open sources of knowledge today. Use this wealth of knowledge and the powerful tool of AI wisely and combine both with in-depth specialist knowledge. This will give you the best prospects for the future.  

Dear first-year students, dear students already enrolled at HCU, I am very much looking for-ward to embarking on the academic year 2025/2026 with you. I wish you and all staff mem-bers a good start and look forward to meeting you in person at our small university, which is characterised by openness and diversity. As every year, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to our AStA, the teaching staff, the employees and the many helpers who will hopefully make the start of this journey easy for you.

Ready for takeoff,
Yours,
Jörg Müller-Lietzkow