School Away From School

A big reason why I wanted to study abroad was to experience what school is like at a public college. I attend Freie Universität Berlin, otherwise known as Free University Berlin. This university was actually formed by students who wanted to be free in how they learned and what they learned. Therefore, the classes that I experience here are often student-led and discussion-heavy. I’ve actually come to really enjoy them!

Here, I take an intensive German class (which really only means that it meets four times a week, not that it’s incredibly hard), a politics class called How (Not) to Govern the Globe, and an art class called Art and Dictatorship.

Each subject class here only meets once a week, but the class is three hours long! As much as I thought this was going to drain me, the teachers offer short breaks after a long time and there’s a lot of movement throughout the classes. I’ve learned that I like them better than the three 50-minute classes a week I’m used to at MLC. With the three-hour chunks, I feel teachers can move more fluidly from subject to subject.

It’s actually midterms this week, and I just took two of them yesterday. They were on paper! And all essays! My hand was cramping, but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

Another big difference is that school here ends on Thursdays. It is so nice to have a four-day work week. The weekend just comes so much sooner and there are so many more possibilities! I use a lot of my weekends to travel and see as much of Europe as I can, and it has been such a blessing to get an extra day in a new city.

Instead of the caf, we have the Mensa. And it is not an all-you-can-eat buffet style. You pay for what you put on your plate, and it’s charged per food type. There is always a theme in the Mensa, but the only one I can remember right now is Meatless Monday (and it’s not my favorite). I can honestly say that I miss the caf at MLC.

However, they do give us an hour and a half for lunch every day, so it’s really easy to go down the street or across town for a grocery store or a quick curry stop.

The class sizes are relatively similar to MLC. My German class is the smallest, and it has 12 students in it. My Art and Dictatorship class has about 20.

Our school here also loves to take us on excursions or send us out into the wild for homework. For my term paper in Art and Dictatorship, I was tasked with assessing the Architecture of the 1936 Olympic stadium and relating it to the events in history going on at that time. Pictured here are the Olympic rings and the inside of the stadium. These were the Olympic games very famously held by Germany’s Dictator, Adolf Hitler, where Jesse Owens took home 4 gold medals for America.

The students here are also very different from the people I know back home. Many come from the East or West Coast and carry very liberal ideals. It’s really opened my eyes to see how the rest of the world thinks, and I feel this is an experience everyone should have. I’ve learned so much about who I am as a person through the values that I do and don’t share with others. And it’s been a little fun to try and be a light, because most students don’t know anything about religion in my program.

There is a church in Zehlendorf that is in connection with Germany’s seminary program. It might also be a retirement home, but God’s Word is good no matter where you hear it!

I am very blessed to see a program different from my own. As a future educator, it’s interesting to watch every teacher’s teaching style and ponder what my future classroom will look like. I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from here, and I have a lot more to learn from MLC when I get back. For now, I’ll enjoy this opportunity that God has blessed me with.