(December 24, 2025) When Dikshitha Madisetty walked up to receive the 2025 Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, her voice shook. The 25-year-old adjunct lecturer in the Business Faculty nearly cried. The moment felt both triumphant and fragile, and one that called for a pause to acknowledge how far she had travelled from a place she once did not know how to survive.
Less than a year earlier, her life in Germany had been on the brink of collapse. She had lost her job, had no steady income, no secure housing, and no clarity about her visa. At one point, she was close to returning to India. “Being young, foreign and alone means there is no safety net,” Dikshitha tells Global Indian. “You build everything from scratch whether its work, stability, confidence or belonging.”
She stayed on, taking survival jobs, navigating unfamiliar professional systems, and rebuilding her footing step by step. Eventually, she returned to the classroom not just as a student of resilience, but as a teacher moulded by it. The Teaching Excellence Award does not signify having ‘made it’. Dikshitha knows this. It is simply a proof that showing up, even while uncertain, can matter.
Dikshitha Madisetty received Teaching Excellence Award 2025 from University of Europe for Applied Sciences
The Teaching Excellence Award, decided by the university’s academic leadership, quality assurance teams, and students, recognises her work of teaching Innovation Management to MBA students. For the young adjunct lecturer, it is a notable milestone. At the same time for her, its meaning goes beyond the recognition itself. It marks a moment where persistence in a foreign land got acknowledged, and where effort, and endurance translated from professional uncertainty to work that resonated.
From Bangalore to Berlin
Dikshitha Madisetty grew up in Bangalore, where she studied at Baldwin Girls’ High School before completing her Bachelor’s degree at LISAA School of Design. Trained in interior, product, and environmental design, she moved to Berlin in 2022 to pursue a Master’s in Innovation Design Management at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences.
“The challenges were intense and very real,” she says, talking about life in a foreign land. “When I first moved to Germany, I struggled with housing and even went homeless for a brief period. I worked survival jobs, and I was fired from multiple roles while trying to understand how professional systems work in a new country.”
Being young, foreign, and alone offered no buffer and required life to be built from scratch. The efforts and experiences, she believes, shaped her more deeply than any formal education could. They also fed into the way she would later teach.
Teacher’s instincts built from lessons of life in a foreign land
Dikshitha does not see teaching as a performance or a position of authority. “My approach is very human,” she says. “I don’t treat students like students. I treat them like people.”
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Her classes prioritise clarity and emotional safety. Each session begins and ends with reflection. It’s a practice she says helps students feel seen, not measured. Failure is not penalised; it is examined. Progress matters more than polish. “I built the kind of classroom I once needed,” she reflects. “One where failure wasn’t feared, and being seen mattered more than being perfect.”
That approach resonated. The Teaching Excellence Award is not tied to a single category but is based on overall impact, student experience, and academic review. Winning it as an adjunct lecturer and that too so early in her career felt more like validation of intent. “It meant a lot because it reflected the students’ experience directly,” she says.
Beyond the classroom
Teaching is only one part of Dikshitha’s life. Recently, she co-founded What Future?, a Berlin-based pop-up dinner and art exhibition series run alongside her friend Tavishi Singh. The concept blurs boundaries between food and art, intimacy and installation, audience and participant. The first event, The Last Supper with My Ex, emerged from a breakup. “We turned that moment into an art exhibition with a dinner hosted inside it,” she says. Guests didn’t just view the work; they ate within it, spoke within it, and experienced it together.
Each event is intentionally temporary. “Nothing is fixed or formal,” she explains. “Each one exists only for that moment and that place.” The aim is not spectacle, but space for conversation, emotion, and connection without performance.
She has also founded BY25, short for Berlin Youth 25, a youth-driven consulting think tank which is being run by consultants under the age of 25. The idea came from repeated frustration. “BY25 exists to challenge the idea that age is a disadvantage,” she says. “Most consultancies lean on years of experience. We lean on relevance, speed, and a perspective shaped by growing up in a world that changes every day.” The team hopes to scale and work with businesses seeking clarity and adaptability, offering what Dikshitha describes as “fearless thinking from people who haven’t been taught to play it safe.”
Dikshitha and Tavishi, cofounders of What Future?
Ambitions of life
For all her ventures, Dikshitha Madisetty speaks carefully about ambition. She is not interested in rapid scaling or public validation. Her goals are quieter and more personal. “My main goal is to influence lives in a meaningful way,” she says. “I want to help people step outside the rat race and question the paths they’ve been told to follow.”
Whether through teaching, writing, or creative projects, she hopes her work creates “small but real shifts” in how people see their own lives. As for the future, she resists fear of where fate would take her. “I see myself as a world citizen,” she says. “I don’t believe in fixed roots. I want to stay where my work has meaning.”
Living through the middle as an expat
Life in Germany, she notes, comes with both freedom and friction. Independence is the reward; loneliness and bureaucracy are the price. “The beginning is the hardest,” she says. “But once you get through it, it builds a level of resilience that stays with you.” For now, she remains in the middle of the journey of teaching, building and creating meaningful ventures, and slowly stitching together a life in a place that once felt impossible to navigate.
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