Hello D.C.!

As you probably already know, I've left foggy San Francisco for our nation's Capital to participate in American University's Washington Semester Program this Spring. I moved into my dorm at AU's Tenley Campus yesterday afternoon and will be living here through early May. After a long day of orientation and initial class meetings today I'm exhausted and excited for what the semester has in store. I'll try to give a little overview of the program and what my semester is going to look like...

The Washington Semester Program has different programs of study and about 360 students this semester. I'm going to be studying Peace and Conflict Resolution with a little under 30 other visiting students. The program is about 1/3 international students and I know that we have students from Germany, Colombia, Brazil, France and Georgia(the country not the state) in the Peace and Conflict Class. There are four components to my semester. I will be getting credit for the (1)Peace and Conflict Seminar class, a (2)Research Class and an (3)Internship/Class and do (4)field research in Europe.

I will have an internship that I will work full days at on Mondays and Tuesday (much more about that later). Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays will be full of seminar meetings. Because the Washington Semester Program is an experiential learning program, none of my weeks will look the same and I will be spending very little time in actual classrooms. My professor, "Lefty", is going to give us the following week's schedule each Thursday. Next week, Wednesday will be spent with separate morning and afternoon classroom sessions broken up with a class lunch. Thursday morning will be spent at the Library of Congress where we will meet with our first guest speaker (1st of about 90!) and the afternoon will hold a meeting for the Research Class. Friday morning our class will be going on the tour of the Holocaust Museum and in the afternoon a Holocaust survivor will tell us her story. And that's just the introductory week! 

I will talk more about the Research and Internship components in later posts as I learn more about them. Now onto the best part...

From March 23 until April 12 I will be traveling to Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. As a class, we will spend 10 days in Cyprus in a couple of cities, 5 days in Athens, and 5 days in Istanbul. I am extremely excited for the trip for many reasons; I've never been to Europe before and have always dreamed of going to Greece, I spent a great deal of time last semester in a class at USF learning about the conflict in Cyprus and am excited to take some of that learning outside the classroom, my professor is of Greek and Turkish origin(among other things) and grew up in Cyprus, and we've already been promised that there will be belly dancing in Istanbul.

I'm sorry that this post was a little all over the place, but that's kind of how my brain is working right now. I am so excited for the rest of this semester and I doubt that I will be able to do all of the things I want to do (have a mentioned yet that I'm in DC?!). I'll leave you now with a picture of what my little corner of DC looks like so far...