Coffee Connections

Coffee Connections is an interview podcast about people whose lives took a turn through Germany. Hanni Geist makes it as a side project alongside a day job representing the German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD, in the western United States. The show has run since 2020 and, by its own account, started out without explicitly discussing DAAD or German universities. Recent episodes make the connection explicit. They carry a '100 Years DAAD' tag for the organisation's centenary, and the cold opens supply the backstory: a Heidelberg student securing the first 13 scholarships for young German academics to go to the U.S., the first holders travelling in 1924, and around 3 million people supported since 1925. Then the guests take over. Aarish Lakhani, a University of Illinois mechanical engineering graduate, talks about a summer research internship through RISE Professional, one of three DAAD RISE programs. He compares the hustle of the American startups he has worked at with the work-life balance of the German research institution where he interned. Older episodes, the host points out, feature RISE Germany alumni. Henry Thomson, an associate professor of political science at Arizona State University, has received DAAD funding four times. His route has a twist: American students he met in Berlin were the ones who told him he could apply for an American PhD, and he still teaches his graduate students material he studied in Germany. Ngoc Vu is originally from Dresden, and his start in piano came by coincidence, because an instrument happened to be in the house his family moved into when he was a boy. A visit to his sister, then training in New York with Lufthansa, planted the idea of living in America, and a DAAD Music Scholarship, auditioned for in Bonn, helped make it happen. That episode is billed as another musical one and closes with a Chopin piece heard in full. Oliver Schramm is introduced as the show's first diplomat. Geist and a team at the German Center for Research and Innovation in San Francisco worked with him while he served as German Consul General there. He explains how a consulate mirrors the role of an embassy, and the talk turns to the near-weekly delegations that came through to see Silicon Valley's tech labs. The 50th episode features Su Friedrich, a DAAD alumna who remembers travelling to Frankfurt and other German cities in 1984 to screen 'The Ties That Bind'. One installment swaps individuals for institutions by talking with German university representatives, and Dresden is sold on its Elbe vineyards, the Saxon Switzerland mountains and a lively student scene. Episodes end with a sign-off about the next coffee break, often paired with an invitation for DAAD alumni to share their own stories. A listener comes away with first-hand accounts rather than a funding guide. Each one comes back to the same question: what did the exchange actually lead to?