Meet The Students

Programs for this blog post

German Language & Culture

Authored By:

Julianne O'Connell

Guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren!

I realized that I as I have been blogging over the past week I have made references to the students and the team without actually giving you any insight into who we are as individuals. Certainly, we are fortunate to have an amazing GROUP of students but they are each truly unique and wonderful in their own way and I want to share that with all of you.

Allow me to introduce our students, along with their first impressions and perspectives of Berlin!

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Donald, Adriana, Jared, Abby

When asked about his first week in Berlin, Donald says: "It was stressful mainly due to the U-Bahn and getting lost but that is also the adventurous part that I love the most, but it was still stressful. Overall my experience has been 1,000,000 percent better than expected"

"I love Berlin, all the tours have been so wonderful, and everybody here is so nice" - Jared

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Destiny, Sofia, Elli -- Cassie, Maryanne, Emi -- Harvey -- Jennifer, Kaashvee, Cat -- Jason, Shiv, Breda -- Skylar

When asked about her first week Breda says "I am so tired, I might literally die."

"Deutsches Essen!" - Jennifer

"Spass, spass, spass" - Cat

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Aaron, Amanda H., Rodrigo, Toy

"I've changed more the in past week than I have in the past six months" - Samantha

" I love it, I love everything here! We haven't done anything that I haven't loved" - Molly C.

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Elise -- Breda, Annie -- Emiliano -- Amanda B., Molly C. -- Griffin -- Anderson, Molly D.

And when I asked Amanda B. to describe her thoughts on her first week in Berlin she said, "I love it here, I love the food and the activities we've done. My host family has been amazing and I love them so much!

"There is a lot of ice cream here. I really like ice cream" - Annie

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Bria, Samantha, Ronan, Claire

We have 37 amazing students (3 of whom didn't want to be photographed, shoutout to Serena, Xavier, and Adelheid, you all rock! ), who come from all over the United States with California, Texas, Florida and North Carolina represented most heavily. In my many years of teaching I can safely say that we have some of the most fun-loving, intelligent, compassionate and mature students ever. They have risen to the challenges of new and frustrating situations and have overcome hard conversations, culture shock, jet-lag, lost luggage, and more with patience and grace. I cannot wait feature some of these wonderful students on the blog later this week as they share their own stories and tales of Berlin.

Of course, a program like this couldn't be run without a little help from the program leaders and for that I would love to send some love to Jana, Katie and Rorey. Together, the four of us make a really cohesive team and we have had a lot of fun planning and executing the programming for our students along with a lot of help and guidance from our Program Coordinator, Sonja, and her assistant, Rachel. We have a great team in Berlin and together with our students we are all becoming eine kleine Familie (a little family).

Photo for blog post Meet The Students
Clockwise from TopLeft: Rorey, Julianne, Katie, Jana

Now that you know who we are, please leave us a comment to let us know who you are, who you belong to (I'm talking to you, parents/siblings/friends of students), and where you are reading from.

Wie immer, (like always)

Danke und bis bald!

Julianne