Assistant Professor of German Fred Yaniga leads the Hillsdale students through Berlin, pointing out historical markers amidst widespread new construction. The city is cosmopolitan and exploding with growth: a vastly different place than he remembers from his last visit when the Berlin Wall still stood. Now, Hillsdale students benefit from his past experience and the new growth as part of their summer trip to Germany.
Hillsdale students studied in Germany for a month as a part of the study abroad program.
Junior Grace Thomson wants to work for the FBI or CIA one day, and hopes her German language skills will help.
“The culture was so unique and it was such a great experience to have everything I had studied beforehand to go and actually see the culture using the language and see all the history,” Thomson said.
Professor of German Eberhard Geyer has taken students to Germany every year, but this summer Yaniga got to go to Germany with the students instead. Yaniga held a class for four hours as part of a formal classroom setting paired with excursions into the city with special assignments like making a hotel reservation.
“We had to go to a bakery, find out what the special was, buy it and bring it back,” Junior Leah Bernhardson said.
Students were forbidden from speaking in English while on the trip to force them to rely on their German language skills.
“So if your hair dryer broke you had to call the other person and ask them in German if you could borrow theirs,” Bernhardson said. “I think we were all really good about policing ourselves to really not speak English, and after the first week I was thinking primarily in German. My English actually got worse. I’d be emailing my parents and they would say ‘What is your grammar here? What’s going on?’”
Students were told to travel around Germany to learn more about the culture.
“We also have weekend trips that we do together, so we’re together an awful lot more which I enjoyed because I got to know the students a lot more,” Yaniga said. “We got to do things like go out to eat dinner together or go to a beer garden together or go to a concert. We went to a folk festival together which is kind of like Oktoberfest. We did things like that together that I don’t get to do here in Hillsdale with students.”
