REQUIREMENTS
Moderation
Requirements
-
The student has to be at the third year level of proficiency or able to
display mastery of the German language in upper level seminars.
- Over the four years students must take 14 courses (56 credits) accredited
by the German Studies Program. These 56 credits include the 8 Senior Project
Credit
- At least six of the fourteen courses must be conducted entirely in German.
Before moderation students must have taken at least five courses accredited
by the German Studies Program.
- Two of the required courses will be chosen from the German history offerings.
German
Language Classes
- German
101 (4 credits) offered to students with no prior knowledge in German,
followed by 102 (4 credits) the next semester
- Transitional German 110 (4 credits) offered to students with some background
in German – accelerated , allows entry into intermediate level after
one semester
- Intermediate German 201 (4 credits)
- Intermediate German 202 (4 credits)
German Literature Classes – 300/400 level
Cross-Disciplinary
Tutorials
____________________________________________
The following is what the students wrote about their experience:
1 > Germany: Problems, learning experiences, people, classes at the university etc.
2 > To be an au-pair for a year – pros and cons
3 > Working with the ‘Musikfestival’ Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
4> Before you go! How to prepare to work, study and live in Germany
5> Teach English with the Bosch Foundation
Germany: Problems, learning experiences, people, classes at the university etc.
By : Valerie Levan
I think the most important thing to stress is not hanging out and speaking
English with other foreign students. It is so difficult to make friends with
German students, but one thing I did in Hamburg that worked really well was to
start a language exchange/ literary discussion group. I just put a flyer up at
the Uni, and some people responded. We started out discussing English and
German literature, but then basically all became friends, and the language
exchange worked really well.
It is also really normal to feel lonely and disoriented for the first few
months - it does get better! I think it is also common to reach a language
plateau after a few months - you understand everything, but just can't express
your ideas the way you want to. This takes a lot of time and effort to work
through, but it is worth it.
It is SO easy (and cheap!) to register at German universities as an auditor,
and while this is not an especially good way to meet people, it is a great way
to get a feeling for German academic life.
To be an au-pair (link to ‘aupair info) for a year – pros and cons
By: Valerie Levan
Being an au-pair was a fabulous experience. There were not any cons for me,
but it is important to really like kids, and not just use it as an easy way to
get to Germany. If I could do anything differently, I would take a German
language course. My speaking improved dramatically, but I still had grammar
problems when I came back, and I think if I had been studying and writing at
the same time, things would have gone a lot faster in terms of language
acquisition. It is also helpful to read only (or at least mostly) in German -
then you can use your new vocabulary right away. One advantage of being an au- pair over being a student is that you are totally immersed in a German language environment (unless the family wants you to teach the kids English). Also, it is not as lonely, since you are part of a family from the very beginning. Plus, there is no better motivation to polish your language skills than being
corrected by a five year-old you are trying to scold!
If you go through an au-pair organization, know your rights! I had some
friends who ended up switching families because they were expected to work 6
days a week and clean the bathrooms. According to German law, the time you
work is limited to a certain number of hours, and you are allotted a specific
salary for that amount of work. Also, your responsibilities do not extend
beyond caring for children - which may involve cooking, laundry, and some light
cleaning, but mostly for the kids. Some people do try to exploit this, so it
is important to know what you are entitled to going in.
Working with the ‘Musikfestival’ (link to Musikfestival)
By: Valerie Levan
Working with the music festival was a great experience, but I think this would be better for more advanced students. After spending a year in Germany, I was very well prepared to a real part of the Festspiel team. It was a lot of fun (and a lot of work) to plan a summer's worth of concerts. At the end of my time there, they let me be a ‘Konzertleiterin’ for two of the smaller concerts, which involved doing everything from booking hotels and arranging travel to making sure there were enough chairs for the audience to handling the sometimes ‘komplizierte’ musicians.By: Carmella LaBianca
I was an intern at the classical music festival for just over a month. The festival operated out of Hamburg, but the staff also traveled around Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to work at various concert sites. I worked in the Hamburg office the first half of the week and drove around the rest of the time. The team I worked with was fortunately a really nice group of people and I had few problems adjusting. Any problems were perhaps my own frustration with the language or lack of sleep while on the road. I did various jobs like sell programs, set up the concert rooms, drive musicians around, put together and distrubte press kits, write any English correspondence...anything that needed to be done.
A friend of mine was au pairing in Hamburg and her family kindly allowed me to stay at their home while I was in Hamburg so I did not have the stress of trying to find an apartment or paying for one. That really made things much easier.
Before you go! How to prepare to work, study and live in Germany
By: Valerie Levan
I don't know if it is still true, but if you go as an au-pair, and your passport is NOT stamped when you enter the country, you don't have to register with the Auslaenderbehoerde. If I had known this, I could have saved myself a lot of time by not standing in line starting at 5 AM to get a ticket, only to be confronted by disgruntled civil servants. However, I am SURE that INS is 20 times worse, so if you are interested in this process, it is a pretty crazy experience to have. It
certainly gave me a whole new perspective on what it means to be a foreigner.
By: Carmella LaBianca
I guess the first time I actually went to Germany, set foot in the country and tried to function in a way other than a backpacking tourist looking for the next bar or museum, nothing could have really prepared me for how difficult communicating in a foreign language can be. But that aside, it was a really good idea to be in Germany for a longer period of time with some kind of job to do. It took me places, forced me to speak German all the time, made me feel useful at times, enabled me to get to know some ‘real live Germans’, gave me the opportunity to try to imagine actually living in Germany on a more permanent basis, and I could see the ‘local side’ to Hamburg. I also developed friends and contacts in Germany, to make coming back to Germany a greater and easier possibility.Cultural Preparation: Germany isn’t drastically different than the United States. It’s not like going to Bali or India. There are enough small differences though to keep you confused many times, frustrated, interested and excited. The best way to prepare yourself culturally for a long stay in a foreign country is to go there as a someone interested in getting to know a different place because it is different. Take notes. Try everything. Confusion and language misunderstandings should, for the most part, be fun and enjoyable and teach you either about yourself as an American or about Germany. No one expects you to do it right as you are a foreigner. Foreigners are interesting and funny. They see things from different angles and with different glasses. That’s you. That is isolating sometimes, but being in America can be damn isolating sometimes too. There is no kit to prepare you for the cultural differences when you go to a foreign country. But you should go because you want it to be different and challenging.
Financial Preparation: It really depends on where you live as to how much money you will need during your stay in Germany. The West is still a bit more expensive. Berlin is the cheapest city to live in, people are payed less accordingly though. Rent in Munich is outrageous and apartments are difficult to find. Maybe the Uni there helps out with that though. Berlin rents in a shared apartment are around 200 a month, including heat and electricity. Food prices are about the same as in the States. Really cheap eats out in a ‘stand-up-kind-of-place’ start at $2.50. A half litre of beer in a normal bar is around $2. So whatever you spend on food now is what you’ll spend in Berlin. Of course you will, and you should, go out a lot. Theater does not have to be that expensive, some theaters sell student tickets, or sell left-over tickets cheaper on the day of the performance. Concert tickets are the same prices as in the States, but entrance fees into clubs are cheaper than in New York City. The most expensive place I’ve ever been to wanted $10 at the door. Most places want $3-5, and not all good places have a cover charge. A bottle of beer in a club is $2.50.
Well, enough about the price of beer...
Once you’re here, you’ll want to go to other places in Germany, check out eastern Europe, TRAVEL. The trains in Germany are expensive, and they recently got even more expensive. If you make your travel plans a year in advance and are a family of 8, then the trains are cheap. If you have a normal lifestyle and are single then they are really expensive. Many people get around through ride-sharing. There are two websites: www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de and www.mitfahrzentrale.de . They connect drivers and travelers together, you just pay for the gas. It is safe. I’ve done it many times and never had a problem and you can save tons of money.
Once you are here, there are some cheap airlines that fly out of Germany: www.germanwings.de, www.aerolloyd.de , www.buzzaway.com, www.airberlin.de, among others.
If you are planning to stay for a while, then you could put an add in one of the papers (Zitty, Tip) to tutor English or correct papers. As an inexperienced tutor you could charge €10-15 an hour. You can also hang up signs at the universities.
Finding an apartment:
The best thing is to live in a WG (Wohngemeinschaft) – share an apartment with other students. You can find furnished rooms for rent in WGs for a short period of time – called “Zwischenmiete” – from one month to as long as a year. This is the best thing as you will immediately have people to get to know and help you out, won’t have to deal with signing leases or deposits, and won’t need to buy anything for the apartment.
The “best” places in Berlin (the places with the most bars, cafes, night life, cheap restaurants, and students, as well as cheaper to live in) are Prenzlauerberg (Pberg), Kreuzberg (Xberg) and Friedrichshain (Fhain). It also depends on which university you will be studying at. Schoeneberg is an alright neighborhood, but to me it’s more expensive and a bit dull. I have never gone out anywhere in Schoeneberg before. Most things happen in the three neighborhoods mentioned above.
Academic preparation:
Well, all classes and most reading is in German, so studying here will basically kick your ass and be pretty difficult, depending on your level of German. Many classes require you give a presentation (can be given in groups though) as well as writing a 10-15 page paper. Some have exams at the end instead of a paper. If you talk to your professor, there is an option of writing your paper in English if you are having tremendous difficulties, although the point of being here is to improve your German AND YOU WILL.
Just keep in mind, no matter how bad or frustrated you feel about your language skills, they ARE getting better. Just relax, and have fun with the whole confusion. In comparison to Bard, there is less reading to do each week for each class (unless it’s a literature class!), so you won’t have to read a German book a week or anything.
During the first two weeks you “shop around” for classes, meaning you don’t sign up (unless it says so in the course book – very rare – but check out if you have to read anything prior to the first class!) but visit whichever class sounds interesting and then pick the ones you want. Make sure you sign up on the lists that get passed around on the first day and pick Referat (presentation) topics as soon as you can. If the class is really full and the professor wants people to leave, you should get priority as an exchange student.
The professor-student attention level is different to Bard. If there are 40 people in class, it is impossible for all to say something. It’s easy to feel lost in a big sea of students. Each professor has specific office hours and there is ususally a sign-up list hanging on his/her door a week before. Then you have to sit and wait a while to talk to him/her. It depends on the professor if he/she has time for you or not. But there is a lot less hand-holding by the professors and administration than goes on at Bard. If you are an exchange student though, there should be some Bard-connected advisor there, no?
If you are coming over to study independantly of Bard, there is a whole bunch of paper work to do and lines to wait in and things to collect. That is a whole other report....
But, ultimately, the three things you’ll need are a dictionary, a sleeping bag and an adventurous attitude.
Teach English with the Bosch Foundation
By: Carmella LaBianca
After my Bard graduation I worked as an English Tutor at the technical university in Ilmenau, Germany. This was a Bosch Scholarship – something that all Bard students can apply for in their senior year. English tutor, hmm, I wasn’t really sure what I’d be doing, but I packed my bags and left for Ilmenau.
There were meeting at the beginning, middle and end of the 10 month program. The first meetings prepared us a bit with what would be expected of us as tutors and established a network among us. I taught English Conversation, Grammar, and American Literature at the university. I had to organize and advertise my own classes, as well as find my own teaching materials. It was a lot of freedom – challenging, but I could do what I wanted once I figured out what that was. Others in the programm were given set classes to teach by their universities. The programm took care of where I lived and paid enough to get by on and travel a little bit. It was a great year, I made some wonderful friends (two of whom I am living with in Berlin with now) and traveled around Germany and got some teaching experience (which makes finding a teaching job afterwards much easier).By: Nathan Reich ( Chicago, March 2003 ) - Also read Nathan's "Annual Bosch Report"
As a child, perhaps like all children, I digested my share of falsehoods in good faith. When I was in former East Germany last year on a Robert Bosch teaching fellowship, I was made particularly aware of one that had lived with me for a very long time, more or less unexamined, its truth as obvious to me as the world is round. Namely, that a capitalist democracy is good and communism bad. Insofar as I envisioned communism in connection with the Soviet Union, I imagined a virtual standstill, a country and a people shrouded in an oppressive and perpetual gray, unmotivated, unwashed, and idle; an overturned wheelbarrow, a muddy road, barefoot children in threadbare denims, an armed soldier in dingy boots, a ramshackle home, a diet of potatoes, turnips and onions. Undoubtedly these images were a distant and enervated cousin of the emotions kindled into fervent flame during the red scare; yet while they may have corresponded to regions of the Soviet Union, I learned that they were not universally the case. In some places children like myself, though they couldn’t travel west, went to school, then to college, and later to graduate school; they read 1984 in class as teenagers and discussed their opinions openly; at twenty-two or twenty-three, it was feasible to start a family and to undertake a Ph.D. simultaneously, because the state paid for day care and University tuition, subsidized housing, food, and healthcare, and then offered you a job that answered to your credentials when you finished your degree. When we compare this situation to the demise of contemporary Ph.D. students in America, individuals who generally wait until they are thirty-five or forty to start a family, who do so under the yoke of sometimes as much as eighty thousand dollars of debt, and who enter a job market that feels more like a lottery of luck than a personal payoff, we cannot roundly condemn communism.
I came away from Rostock, where for ten months I had taught American language and culture to University students, with the following impressions: national borders do not reflect a permanent state of affairs but a state of arrested conquest and exhaustion; a need to regroup and replenish a military’s need of men; to proselytize and generate a consensus called popular opinion, or nationalism or patriotism; to educate an army of engineers and scientists that can organize and manufacture raw materials into a country’s internal prosperity; to gain leverage over potential rivals and to incite less fortunate countries to pursue amicable although dependent and therefore indebted relations. In short, my confidence in a capitalist democracy was shaken, not because democracy is inferior to communism, but because governments abuse and will always abuse their power, because virtuous leaders are seldom born and even less frequently succeed.
I find that I now take little comfort in the thought that men could live at peace with one another, although they certainly possess the power to do so. And it is not because they don’t want to. It is because we remain convinced that nations facilitate human happiness; that governments reflect our interests; that militaries are essential; and that wars are sometimes inevitable. None of this is true, although all of it is confirmed by and needs the support of public opinion, which has always been the opiate of the masses, whether cut in the cloth of religion or of materialism. Nations and public opinion are inseparable; the latter is simply internalized, and corroborated and extended by word of mouth; it is a form of self-government that corresponds to a nation’s political and fiscal ambitions.
I find my opinion about the relation between government and men confirmed whenever I travel abroad; that everywhere individuals share largely the same interests—in truth, the good life and beauty; in inquiry, family and art; in curiosity, friendship and genius—and that it requires the sustained assault of metaphysical fanatics to persuade us that we are genuine, ideological, irreconcilable enemies. But this rhetoric, an intoxicated cruelty freely distributed from the wagon of charisma, is a fantasy. Only he that has come to believe in it could ever impose it as truth on the impressionable hearts and minds of children or students, or on a nation weakened by intestine discord and poverty. The tragedy, of course, is that men and women flourish in society; that a government structures and ensures the safety of society; and that men can’t live both prosperously and peacefully with government or without it. The only specific against the unconscionable excesses of government and the inadvertent tyranny of the masses. . . is a critical and independent mind. Such a mind is both the most vulnerable and the most indefatigable enemy of popular opinion; and it is also its own defense; and if it is drawn to pursue its freedom in a foreign land, then its inclination to do so is beyond reproach.
