"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" (Aristotle).

The needs and requirements of migrant students [1] are largely congruent across the universities with regard to career entry. In order to bundle resources and use synergies, the Rhine-Main universities - Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, RheinMain University of Applied Sciences as well as Darmstadt University of Technology - have joined forces in order to offer career orientation and career entry for students with a migrant background in a modular structure. for migrant students in a modular structure in a International Career Service Rhine-Main (ICS RM) and to jointly offer them to the students of all partner universities. The project understands itself explicitly as a cohesion project of several universities. The organization of an online career week for employers and international students or graduates of the Rhine-Main region - the "Matching Week", which took place for the first time in November 2022 for the first time.

In a next step, the five Hessian partner universities are now striving to build up the ICS RM in this network within the framework of a grant from the European Social Fund through further target group-specific offerings and to establish it as a platform in the region in the long term. The ICS RM will be able to realize a considerably larger variety of services for migrant students than a single university, so that the students will be offered can take advantage of diverse, custom-fit and demand-oriented offers. Thus, the offer is not limited to the - undisputedly most important and basic - help of application counselling and workshops on the topic, but offers in-depth insights into corporate culture(s), creates direct contact with labor market players and companies, and also includes important topics such as founding and entrepreneurship or digitization.

The Rhine-Main universities achieve added value for their efforts in internationalization and transfer with the association. They also contribute to the attractiveness of the Rhine-Main region as a place to study. The joint action of the of the universities in this field of action promises great synergy potentials, which contribute to sustainable anchoring and resource conservation. These are, for example:

•  Improved utilization of the offerings at the individual universities due to greater participant potential,
•  Increasing the diversity of offerings through task sharing,
• Use of existing infrastructure and know-how of the individual universities in the area of career service and recruiting,
• Expansion of the employer network with (professionally conditioned) low competition among each other,
•  greater willingness on the part of associations and companies to participate thanks to the great diversity of the degree programs in combination with a central point of contact for university marketing in the Rhine-Main metropolitan region.

The universities from Mainz are partners of Matching Week and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz is also an associated partner of the ICS RM. 

[1] Migrant students are students who were born abroad and immigrated to Germany and/or students who have at least one parent who was born abroad and immigrated to Germany. immigrated to Germany.