(Profile from 2022)

Dagmar Möbius

Benedikt Wiedenhofer is the first member of his family to go to university. After his Bachelor’s degree in European studies in Bavaria, he came to TU Dresden for a Master’s in International Relations. The 30-year-old from Bad Tölz has now been working in Brussels as a trade policy advisor at the European association of business federations, BusinessEurope, since 2018.

With a strong grade average of 1.7 in his Abitur, the qualification required to study at a university in Germany, Benedikt Wiedenhofer didn’t initially know what career he wanted. He was interested in languages, history, and other cultures, and had taken advanced English and Latin. “But I saw interpreting as too restrictive,” he says. A friend then told him about the European studies program at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. “One of the academic advisors told me you could do a lot with the program – and that you had to. She was right. My studies from 2011 onwards were very broad: everything from languages, literature, art history, business management, and economics to intercultural communication,” says Benedikt Wiedenhofer. “Orientation” he calls it, admitting that “although the university and its staff were great, by the second semester I was already wondering what we were supposed to end up doing.”

He found political science and economics particularly interesting. And he took multiple additional courses. “For many Master’s programs, you need 60 ECTS credit points in the relevant discipline,” he says, but that was only one of his reasons. As part of his Bachelor’s degree, Benedikt Wiedenhofer spent one year interning at the Siemens EU Liaison Office in Brussels and at the German Embassy in Dublin, finishing in 2015. He wanted his Master’s to be more specialized. “That’s how I ended up choosing the M.A. in International Relations at TU Dresden. The option to choose either international business or international law before starting made it pretty unique in Germany,” he tells us. At the time, his only experience of East Germany was a class trip to Berlin. “Getting to know my own country better after my stays abroad was an appealing prospect,” he explains. Wiedenhofer passed an interview to become one of just 15 students in each of the specializations of International Organizations and Global Political Economy.

The degree demanded a lot of him. “I had to catch up on a lot of things on my own,” he says, including statistics, political science theories and empirical methodology. Benedikt Wiedenhofer praises the facilities and resources at the university and the expertise at the Center for International Studies. “Dresden was also a great place for student life,” he laughs, and explains that he associates his time in the city with the consumption of lot of mate tea-based drinks. He found courses with Dr. Sebastian Lange fascinating and inspiring because of all the exciting background information they provided. “Prof. Dr. Kreickemeier’s economics lectures were hard, but you also learned a lot. Dr. Markus Gastinger was very strict about the methodology, but that really helped me. He put me on the right track when I was looking for a topic and methodology for my Master's thesis,” Benedikt Wiedenhofer remembers.

Wiedenhofer explored trade policy trends over the past 20 years, and in particular the extent to which the European Union had been able to address “Singapore issues” in bilateral trade agreements with developing countries. The topic of his Master’s dissertation helped him get an internship at the Secretariat of the EU Parliament in Brussels, which ran from October 2017 to the end of February 2018. During that time, a vacancy came up at BusinessEurope, the European association of business federations. “The job profile was a perfect fit,” he laughs. He applied, successfully, and his appointment was seamless: “I defended my Master’s dissertation on the Friday and signed an employment contract on the following Monday.”

Benedikt Wiedenhofer has been working as a trade policy advisor at the European business association BusinessEurope in Brussels since February 2018. The International Relations department where he works has a team of six, four of whom are advisors. Their dossiers are defined both geographically and thematically. Benedikt Wiedenhofer is responsible for EU relations with China, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Andean Community and the Caribbean. He also works on EU development policy and the implementation of EU trade agreements. Currently, for example, he is looking at how more private investment could be brought into developing countries and how foreign subsidies could be regulated. Another practical example of his work is the exchange of sanctions between the EU and China since March 2021. “The EU-China investment agreement has been on hold since then,” explains Benedikt Wiedenhofer, “but China nonetheless remains an important trading partner for the EU.”

In his job, he reads relevant (news) reports and studies, and writes articles, letters, position papers, and speeches. He organizes conferences, seminars, and webinars, manages working groups, and engages with representatives of member associations, companies, EU institutions, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and states. Benedikt Wiedenhofer knows that “some topics sound dry to outsiders,” but explains that “it’s very exciting when you’ve really got your finger on the pulse, when you’re talking about the megatrends of the next 20 or 30 years.”

He has found his vocation and wants to stay in Brussels. “If someone had told me when I graduated from high school where I’d be working today, it would have seemed implausible to me,” he laughs. “You find out a lot about international relations in the course of your studies. You can’t give up; you learn a lot along the way and you can specialize.”
In his free time, Benedikt Wiedenhofer also likes to cook international cuisine.

A word from the editor
When asked by the TUD pupil mentoring program, Benedikt Wiedenhofer immediately agreed to be interviewed and answer school students’ questions. The project is aimed at making young students aware of the challenges of studying and introducing them to the potential professions associated with specific degree programs. Ianina Scheuch also took part. Everyone was agreed that it a great opportunity and should be repeated.

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Benedikt Wiedenhofer
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