Finding "Awesome" in Munich: Catching Up with Soren Little ‘11

Soren Little and I met up online while he was in Boston for a VLDB conference. "Computer science people remain ever so creative when it comes to naming their conferences," he joked. VLDB, in case you were wondering, stands for Very Large Data Bases.

It's a fitting bit of self-deprecation from someone who has spent the last several years living inside exactly that kind of world — one of data, optimization, and the quiet math that keeps complicated systems running. But Soren's path there wasn't a straight line, and neither was his path to Germany, where he's now lived for eight years and built a life, a career, and a company he loves.

From Munich to "OSM"

After graduating from the German International School, Soren spent 7 years at Oregon Episcopal School (this was before GIS had a Middle School—or a Chinese immersion track), then he enrolled at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2018, where he studied computer science and statistics with a particular pull toward quantum computing research. He started a master's degree but never finished it. Instead, about a year and a half ago, he left graduate school to co-found a software company with a partner: OSM — pronounced, as he'll happily tell you, "Awesome."

The company works in algorithmic decision-making, partnering with businesses that manage constrained resources and need to quantify trade-offs. A trucking company trying to route vehicles efficiently between cities is the kind of example Soren used to illustrate his work. "It's all rather abstract," he admitted, "but basically we help companies optimize networks and how they distribute resources." What sets OSM apart, he says, is a philosophical shift: OSM treats this work as a data problem, whereas it has historically been treated as a problem of applied math.

Since founding OSM, Soren and his partner have raised venture capital and grown the company to seven employees. It's a long way from where he expected to be when he first left for Germany — and yet, in his telling, it all makes a certain kind of sense.

Why Germany?

Soren never loved the American college application process — the ritual of assembling a list of "match" schools meant to demonstrate a calculated range of selectivity. The problem, as he saw it, was that you could never really know what a school wanted in any given year. "If you're a tuba player," he asked, "how do you really know if your dream school has a tuba player, or just graduated one?"

So he applied to a mix of schools that genuinely interested him and a handful of safer options — and treated studying in Germany as his backup plan. He did receive a few offers from American schools, but nothing that excited him. Meanwhile, a stroke of good fortune tipped the scales: his childhood best friend from GIS had an older sister attending medical school in Munich, which meant Soren would have both a landing pad and reliable "intel" on student life in Germany. That connection took some of the risk out of the decision.

The more he thought about it, the more Germany started to look less like a fallback and more like a cool opportunity — a chance to do something different, to practice his German, and to make the most of an unbeatable value proposition: German university was, at the time, completely free. "It's different now," he conceded, "but it's still immeasurably less expensive comparatively." Between the novelty, the cost, and the language practice, the decision came together, and he went.

A Rusty Return to German

Fluency, it turned out, was more theoretical than practical. Despite learning German at GIS, Soren had spent the following seven years at Oregon Episcopal School attending a mainstream, English-language middle and high school — years compounded by, in his words, a typical teenager self who "didn't want to do basically anything at all." By the time he arrived in Munich, his German was rusty, and the local Bavarian dialect was, "a beast."

His first year was rough. Sitting in a university-level calculus course taught entirely in German was, he said, a daunting experience for someone only theoretically fluent. But living with Germans and speaking the language constantly did what immersion tends to do: within a year, it came back. "Now my German is very good," he said simply.

Advanced Daycare vs. Radical Independence

Beyond the language, the German university system itself was a different animal altogether. Where American universities are built around a steady drumbeat of homework, quizzes, and tests, German universities center almost entirely on a single final exam. Everything is in service of that one assessment. There's no one checking in on your progress along the way — you are, fundamentally, responsible for your own learning.

Soren loved that. He described American college, only half-joking, as "advanced daycare" — a system with university housing, organized sports, and layers of hand-holding that extend far beyond academics. "In Germany, you find your own joy," he said. "It's not a socially engineered social space." Sitting in lecture halls of 700 students could feel anonymous, even isolating at times, but the agency it demanded of him was something he came to see as a real strength — a system he thrived in.

What GIS Gave Him

I asked Soren how his time at GIS prepared him for such a dramatic cultural transition, and about his memories of the school more broadly. He lit up talking about it — recalling, in particular, the day he shadowed then–Head of School Blake Peters as part of a "Head for a Day" program. He also laughed remembering how bad he was at money math as a kid, struggling to convert between euros and dollars, metric and imperial. "I was terrible at it!"

But the deeper gift of a GIS education, as he saw it, wasn't really about logistics or even language — it was intercultural competency. "All my teachers were native Germans," he said. "That diversity of perspective seeps into a young mind, and you absorb things you aren't even aware of." It's a kind of exposure he sees as largely missing from a traditional American educational experience, and one he credits with shaping how he engages with the world today. Students who get that kind of early cultural exchange, he believes, are "so much better equipped to engage with the world more openly and capably."

For Soren, moving to Germany for university was really just the natural extension of an education that had already opened that door. Now settled in Munich, he counts friends from all over the world among his circle. "That early exposure plants the seed," he reflected. "I have an immensely positive view of the world."

Eight years in, the country that once felt so foreign to him has become home — dialect, calculus lectures, and all. Between building OSM and settling into life in Munich, Soren's story is a reminder that the best opportunities sometimes come disguised as backup plans.