Kathrin Schmitt, Chemistry

Flying from one country to the next, looking after customers during the day, eating out with them in expensive restaurants in the evening and flying back home the next day. For many, it sounds like an adventure and they would do it in a heartbeat. For Kathrin Schmitt, it's her daily work.

It's seven o'clock in the morning, Kathrin Schmitt is on the plane on her way to a business meeting in Bulgaria. She was in England just yesterday and the end of the week is not yet in sight. This is what her job looked like a few years ago, before she decided to take a more balanced approach to her life. In her current job as a sales manager in a chemical company, she is also often travelling, but no longer works in such a large area. ‘Travelling is great, of course, I've got to know and love many places, even small and inconspicuous ones, but it can also be very stressful with the job,’ she says.

Schmitt's interest in chemistry was awakened at an early age. This was not least due to the fact that she grew up in Leverkusen. Bayer, one of the largest chemical companies in the world, is based there and has enormous significance for the city and its surroundings. ‘At school, it felt like everyone had at least one relative who worked at Bayer,’ says Schmitt. When she was 14, she had a chemistry teacher who left a special impression on her. She particularly remembers an experiment in which he showed and explained how he used red cabbage juice as a pH indicator. ‘It was really exciting to see that and to be able to understand what was going on chemically.’ Through contacts in her family, Schmitt was offered a three-week internship at another chemical company. This made her realise that she didn't want to sit in a lab and she immediately set herself the highest goal: she wanted to become a manager.

To pursue this, Kathrin Schmitt began studying chemistry at the University of Bonn. ‘It was the typical first years as a student: everything is new, you learn to organise yourself and you concentrate on your studies,’ she says. However, she found studying at university very dry and not very practice-orientated. So she considered transferring to a university of applied sciences, which she did in 2004. The Rheinbach campus of H-BRS offered a good mix of theory and practice. Many of her fellow students there had already completed an apprenticeship, while in Bonn most of them were fresh out of school. This allowed us to exchange ideas and help each other better thanks to our different experiences. Another difference that proved to be groundbreaking for Schmitt was that at HBRS you were also encouraged to look at the distribution of chemical products - at the university, on the other hand, it was 95 per cent laboratory work, according to Schmitt.

Schmitt wrote her thesis in product development at Schneidereit, a company specialising in industrial washing machines and dryers. ‘I met someone there who recommended that I go into sales because I had what it takes,’ she recalls. She was sceptical at first because she saw herself more in product development, but she still wanted to give it a try. This is her nature and today she recommends it to anyone who asks her: ‘Stick your finger in everywhere, try everything out, because that's the only way you'll know whether you like it or not’.

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Three months later, she started a job as an account manager at Zschimmer & Schwarz. She enjoyed the insight into sales there and took care of relationships with new and existing customers. Over the next two and a half years, she was able to gain a lot of experience here. In 2010, she nevertheless moved to Stepan Europe. There she continued to work in sales as Area Sales Manager, but was responsible for all customers in Europe. Although this meant a higher salary, it also meant a lot more work. Travelling from morning to night, only finding out at very short notice where you would be the following week and little time for friends and family. ‘Sometimes I really wondered where I was right now,’ says Schmitt. ‘But there were also a lot of positive things: I learnt a lot about my job, got to know new places and sometimes stayed a weekend longer.’ As Schmitt also likes to wield a wooden spoon and describes herself as an absolute foodie, she also collected new ideas for cooking while travelling. She is particularly fond of fusion cuisine, spicing up classic home cooking and conjuring up a new, lighter dish.

After two and a half years in this stressful job, however, she felt that her ‘scales’, her life-work balance, had become unbalanced. She changed jobs again in 2012, this time as Sales Manager at Elementis, her current employer. There, she is only responsible for the German-speaking region, looking after the sale of chemical raw materials and customer support. ‘We have small and large customers, there is a lot of variety. Sometimes customers want chemicals with special properties and I have to see if this is chemically possible’.

But as busy as she is in her new job. The 35-year-old is also involved in the social sector: she has been a mentor at ‘Die Komplizen’ since 2012. This is a non-profit organisation that helps young career starters and students about to graduate to find their way. The mentors take pupils with the same field of interest under their wing and use practical examples to show them where opportunities for advancement lie and how they can achieve what they want to achieve. ‘You're a kind of big sister or big brother,’ says Schmitt. ‘The students can talk about anything and ask questions.’

So Kathrin Schmitt is still not only travelling a lot in her job, but also in her private life. However, she now feels that her balance is even. But there was something else: she hasn't lost sight of her ambitious goal of becoming a boss. Her boss is retiring soon and she would like to take over: ‘I will at least give it a try. If I like it, great, if not, I'll have learnt something again.’

Text: Michael Steimel

Michael Steimel is studying Technical Journalism at our university. He wrote this portrait as part of an elective course (portrait writing using the example of H-BRS alumni) in the winter semester 2015/2016.