Wittenberg University

Personally, my first few weeks at Wittenberg were a little shaky, back in August – as I’m sure was the case with most freshmen, pushed into a new environment, routine and social scene. Since last time, I’ve returned from a refreshing vacation back in cold, snowy Northern Europe, where I’m pretty sure we’re having our own mini ice age at the moment, and where I spent a fantastic few weeks playing in the snow, seeing friends and eating many a home-cooked meal. Returning to Wittenberg for a second semester is definitely a completely different experience than arriving for the first – in an acutely positive way. Instead of being another shaky return, highlighted by uncertainty and doubt, getting back here this time around was much more akin to arriving to a place of one’s own, a place much more homely. Knowing your way around, having friends to catch up with and say “hi” to, and having already been accustomed to the way of life here has helped make this first week of second semester one of the best I’ve had here.

Also helpful is the fact that I’m really enjoying this round of classes, which, this semester, heavily lean toward the humanities, with philosophy, communications, sociology and language courses on my plate. Especially cool is telling your friends back home that you have an anthropology professor who, when not teaching classes at Wittenberg, is off doing research with the indigenous folk of Papua New Guinea. The Wittenberg Theater Department is also swinging into full gear in preparation of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” opening in February, and I’ve already started including Shakespearian parlance in my daily conversation.

Not a worry in the world,

Martin

A word of warning to future abroad college students: try not to book your flights home until you know your exam schedule. The fact that I had not heeded this piece of advice is what is still keeping me on Wittenberg campus this Friday afternoon before the winter holidays. Booking airplane tickets early in the summer will certainly save you plenty of money, but you might have to stay on campus a little longer to wait for your flight. Looking at the school calendar before the semester, one would have read that this last week would be fully devoted to exams. Each student’s exam layout, however, is of course highly individual and one that could possibly let you get off campus before the end of the week. It’s a two-sided coin, however, and I personally don’t really mind resting up for a couple of days, having time to pack and clean the dorm before leaving. The near-deserted Wittenberg campus is currently savagely being invaded by a flurry of snowflakes. This is something not necessarily conducive to air traffic, but definitely lovely to see.

Although most in-state students, except for perhaps the unfortunate ones with Friday exams, have already left for home, in addition to a number of international students, I don’t leave until tomorrow, Saturday morning, making this a good moment to think back to the past semester, my first semester of higher education. The most important and, to me, surprising thing about it was how quickly it went be. It goes by FAST! Before you know it! Poof! Fleeting as it was, plenty of memories were definitely made. It was an alright start.

Among the books I’ll be taking with me over winter break is a copy of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” This being the case since, just last week, I managed to land a role in Wittenberg’s spring main stage production of that very play, directed by our very own Professor Reynolds of the Theater Department, opening in February 2011 at Chakeres Memorial Theater.

I guess that about does it. As for me, I’m ready to go home and enjoy some of mom’s home cooking.

Have yourselves merry little Christmases,

Martin

It’s a magical feeling to wake up in the morning and be surprised to see the ground outside covered in a blanket of white. Naturally, there are those who say: “it’s too cold,” to which I reply, “there’s no such thing as cold weather, there’s only inappropriate clothing!” Personally, snow just reminds me of home, where my driveway in Estonia currently has snow up to the waist, snow which I will be happily shoveling into messy heaps in just a few weeks time. Very appropriately, the snow this year came on the first of December, right in time to get into the spirit of Christmas (or whatever your preferred winter holiday..) I know I have been completely and utterly pumped and jovial all day, smiling to myself as I walk around campus, walking around in my warmest jacket for the first time. I even called my family back home to tell them about the fresh precipitation.

Other things to be excited about around this time of the year are, well .. finals. It’s not so much the finals that we’re excited about, but the vacation that it in most cases results in. Of course, we just came from Thanksgiving break, which for international students isn’t so much about spending time with family, but rather, with other people’s families. I had to pleasure of staying with one of my RAs in the Cleveland area. My adoptive grandparents were wonderful, cooked fantastic meals, gave me a longer, wider and softer bed to sleep in and treated me as one of their own. By the way, If you ever find yourself in Cleveland, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum is a must! Thanksgiving dinner was everything it had been hyped up to be, in both quantity and quality. Speaking of food, Thanksgiving itself seems like something of an appetizer for Christmas. After this week, we only have five more days of classes, followed by an exam week. Thanksgiving has gotten me familiarized with the idea of watching TV and generally lounging around the home for a while. I can’t wait!

That being said, this past week has probably been one of the busiest during my time here so far, so it’s no walk in the park. That wonderful holiday-colored light at the end of the tunnel is brighter than ever though, the fresh snow making it all the more shinier, a tunnel which in my case will be an airplane ride back to Europe for a few weeks.

Martin

The majestic, even heroic, walk down the hill from Hollenbeck hall to the Student Center on a Friday afternoon is a wonderful one, signaling the passing of yet another week and access to some welcome rest and television-watching. Today’s walk was perhaps even somewhat more spectacular than on other Fridays, since it is on the eve of Thanksgiving break, which starts up next Tuesday, as soon as class gets out. We’re all bustling with anticipation, many of us planning to go back to our respective hometowns in Ohio. As for me, I’ll probably be finding someone else’s home to go to. A home that doesn’t require 12+ hours of air travel to get to.

Speaking of the weekend and things to do during it, I had the pleasure of going on an outing to the National Museum of the US Air Force last weekend (“the world’s oldest and largest military aviation museum and one of Ohio’s most visited tourist attactions..”) with the Wittenberg Astronomy Club. Our group was small and led by the terrific physics professor Dr. Fleisch, probably the ideal person with whom to walk through a museum like this one. Dr. Fleisch, incidentally, was also just the other day announced as the 2010 Ohio Professor of the Year. It’s not hard to see why.

The museum was held in the confines of roughly six very very large and bulging airplane hangars, with exhibits of airplanes dating back to the days of Ohio’s very own Wright brothers, planes during the World Wars – including the very plane that dropped the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. There was also an exhibit of presidential Air Force Ones throughout the ages, which visitors could walk through, as well as experimental aircraft. Naturally, the afternoon of walking and learning concluded with dinner at an Indian buffet on the way back to Wittenberg, a mere forty minute drive from the museum itself.

In other news, the latest iteration of the Harry Potter movie franchise premiered at 12:01 AM today. I happened to be in a group that went to see the midnight premiere last night, in nearby Beavercreek. The film was great, go see it! We obviously didn’t get back to campus until rather late at night, which was, fortunately, made easier for me by virtue of my first class on Friday being as late as 11:30.

Gobble, gobble.

Martin

This week, I have come to know a side of my college education that most people, including myself, had never really given much though to, prior to attending. It’s something that most high schoolers take for granted, never think twice about and occurs spontaneously or is done by someone else. I am, of course, referring to class registration, a process that sneakily creeps up on you toward the end of the semester and plays something of a big role in acquiring a bachelor’s degree.

As bright-eyed freshmen, excited to move on to bigger and better things in their second semester, find out around November, classes don’t register themselves and you might actually have to fight for them and – in some cases – spend suspenseful moments at your computer, ready to click “submit” as your registration window nears, and as you watch the “seats available” count next to your dream course count down to “0.” And once your registration time comes, you might find yourself doing something much like getting the last bid in on an Ebay auction, since you won’t be the only one anxiously waiting behind your screen, hoping to snatch up the last spots in Professor Davis’ “Literature and Madness” course, or other popular subjects.

The way in which registration works at Wittenberg (and many other colleges,) is that at the beginning of the registration period, upper class students get priority and registration opens to them earlier. The last to be able to register are freshmen, and even among them do some get to register before others. In any case, I (and I’m sure I’m not alone) currently feel like I’m the last person on campus to get to sign up, as my slot has still not yet opened up and some of the classes I was hoping to take are marked “CLOSED.” I guess there’s always next year to look forward to, when I’ll be looking down at all the freshmen, some of whom will inevitably find themselves in the same position I am in now. But on the bright side, even if you don’t get to take that one class you really really wanted to, there’ll always be other fascinating things you might not have considered taking, like an obscure philosophy class or “Social Dance,” so that no one should be left without any classes whatsoever to take in the spring.

Martin

While the rest of Wittenberg’s students waited till the third week of October to finally get some well-deserved rest and enjoy fall break, I got my roommate to drive me to the Springfield Greyhound station and took off to Chicago, for my own little vacation, a week early. On Sunday, October 10 (10/10/10), the Chicago Marathon took place and since I had a friend running, this seemed as good a weekend as any to explore one of the great cities of America.

There are two primary methods, in addition to a personal car, that people here travel to Chicago – airplane and bus. I chose the bus, since it stops right in Springfield, as opposed to having to drive to the airport in Dayton or Columbus, as well as it being slightly (not tremendously!) cheaper. There are, however, inherent risks to pursuing this course of action, as I found out. The most notable being delayed buses and missed connections. To get to Chicago, I needed to take one bus from Springfield to Indianapolis, and another one from there to my final destination. However, since my first bus was an hour late, I, as a consequence, missed my second bus and spent most of my first night in an Indianapolis bus station. I was lucky though, since another bus scheduled to arrive in Springfield a few minutes after mine didn’t show up at all. At the same time, riding a bus is probably one of the best ways to experience authentic America and Americans and is definitely worth doing at least once.

I didn’t let bus delays and logistics falter my optimism though, and once I arrived in the early morning, to the sight of the blinking lights at the top of the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and the Chicago skyline, things only went uphill. Chicago is a great city to just walk around in and if you get tired, the public transportation works nicely too. There are museums and theaters, in addition to arbitrary pieces of art on the streets, such as a temporary 30-foot steel and fiberglass eyeball in Pritzker Park or the iconic bean in Millennium Park. Suffice to say, a single weekend was not enough to properly discover the city.

Sunday provided a very unusual sight as well, with the center of the city being the site of this year’s Chicago marathon. Streets were blocked off to traffic and people had crowded the sides of the streets to cheer on the runners. It was a great atmosphere of friendly people who shouted encouragement and played music in the streets. A lot of the runners also wore costumes to lighten the mood. For example, one very brave man ran the 42 kilometer (26 mile) race with a large Eiffel Tower attached to his back. This year’s event boasted 45,000 participants and since the route curved through a lot of different districts of the city, was a great way of getting to know neighborhoods one wouldn’t otherwise end up in.

To top off a fantastic weekend of adventure in the big city, I even made it back to Springfield on time for my Monday afternoon English class!

Martin

People aren’t kidding when they say time flies at incredible speeds here. Never in my life have days and weeks (before you know it – entire months) gone by as fast as they do at Wittenberg. I like to think that it’s because I have so many different things to do during my day that there is no time left to sit bored in my room and notice time passing. Since whole months can seem to blend into a single high-speed jumble, the desire to do something new and exciting, to break away from inevitable routine, takes high priority.

Before I continue, I might as well introduce myself. My name is Martin and today is my 52nd day on Wittenberg campus, as a freshman international student. I come from Estonia, a country slightly smaller than the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, with roughly the population of the latter. It’s a pitch I could recite in my sleep. It turns out, news of Estonia doesn’t reach the United States as much as news of larger countries does, so don’t be feel bad if you need to look it up. It’s located in northeastern Europe, neighbored by Finland, Latvia, Russia and Sweden. And although it’s really really far from here, it’s not all that dissimilar. In fact, when I first drove out of Columbus, Ohio, on my first trip to Springfield, I couldn’t help but notice that in its flatness, Ohio’s countryside looked a lot like the farmland I would drive by back home. Among many other things, Estonia is known for its world champion cross country skiers, having held the world’s first internet elections and being the creator of Skype, a software application used by a great number of Wittenberg students to keep in touch with family far away.

In the Estonian language, roller-coasters are often referred to as “American mountains,” because of the way old wooden roller-coasters resembled the tall landmasses. Last weekend, the American International Association – one of the largest organizations on campus, devoted to helping broaden students’ cultural horizons and being a good way for students of different nationalities to get to know each other – hosted a trip to Kings Island, one of the most visited theme parks in the nation and less than an hour’s drive from Wittenberg’s campus.

It ended up being a leisurely day, despite the heavy rainfall, of spending time with international friends, hearing other languages, seeing Halloween decorations, being spun upside-down and feeling the adrenaline rush on rides with names like “Flight of Fear” and “Invertigo.” Many of us also found out, for the first time, what “funnel cake” tasted like. Most importantly though, it was a way of making a weekend memorable and something more than ordinary. It also goes to show that there are plenty of things for students – international or otherwise – to do in their free time, both inside and outside Springfield.

Martin