Students packed a suitcase, hopped on a plane, and flew across the world for schooling in another country this summer. From learning the difference between garden peas and mash peas to arguing in German over a town’s best church, four students tell their stories.

Würtzberg, Germany

Senior Lance Lintuerer ate pretzels and sipped Helles beer with the Hillsdale German Department in Würzburg, Germany. Lintuerer said he first learned of the program from a former student, and it was also his love of the German department that convinced him to go.

“They have this incredible culture where they get people going on this program really consistently,” Lintuerer said. “The professors in this department are awesome.”

Students in the Hillsdale program took classes with Associate Professor of German Stephen Naumann and Emily Goodling ’14, learning Johann Wolfgang von Goethe literature and German culture.

“It’s an immersion program, so you’re supposed to learn by, first and foremost, speaking only German, and then experiencing German life by living there,” Lintuerer said.

Lintuerer said he struck up a conversation with a stranger in German when Lintuerer made a claim about “the best church in Würzburg.”

“An older guy — German — with a huge handlebar mustache just started shaking his head like he doesn’t agree. And I called out to him like, ‘What do you think is the best church?’” Lintuerer said. “It just turned into a conversation about the history of Würzburg and German culture, and it was just a great conversation. You can’t have that elsewhere.”

Lintuerer said his favorite memories included members of the study abroad group going out for a beer or to a restaurant together. Without them, Lintuerer said he would not have enjoyed Germany so much.

“I’m confident it must have been one of the best groups the program has ever had,” Lintuerer said. “When you think of German culture, you think of beer, and what better way to experience that culture than to just have a really tasty beer with a group of people and just laugh.”

Oxford, England

It took a random conversation about summer plans to spark junior Becca Gilchrist’s decision to travel to “the city of dreaming spires,” where she spent four weeks studying Shakespeare and politics with the Oxford Study Abroad Programme at the University of Oxford.

“A lot of what Shakespeare was writing about was divine right and monarchy,” Gilchrist said. “I was able to hear and have these conversations with a tutor who still lives under a similar system.”

Gilchrist said managing her time to complete an essay per week without a prompt, when she normally would have had several weeks, was her biggest challenge.

“I really had to second-guess, ‘How am I reading this text? Am I thinking about it quickly as I’m going, or am I waiting for somebody to tell me where these significant issues are?’” Gilchrist said.

Outside of writing papers, Gilchrist experienced the British-American language barrier when ordering at a restaurant.

“The waiter kept on asking these questions, and I just had no idea what he was asking, and I ended up ordering something, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what I just ordered,’” Gilchrist said. “We ended up using hand signals to try to explain the difference between garden peas and mash peas.”

While Gilchrist thought England’s standard of living was lower than America’s, given her lack of a dryer and air conditioning, she enjoyed the cultural sense of living in the past.

“Pub culture — you go and you have a drink and you’re hanging out — gives you much more time to just sit and relax,” Gilchrist said. “It felt like you were living a simpler life with more time to really reflect and just enjoy the moment and enjoy the people around you.”

Istanbul, Turkey

Junior Madeleine Choe’s trip to Istanbul, Turkey, was not intended to be a language immersion trip, but Choe, who speaks French, Italian, Japanese, and Turkish, decided to turn it into one. Choe first discovered the program through Assistant Professor of Medieval History Charles Yost’s Western Heritage class, and he offered her a spot.

“He found out that I speak Turkish because I lived in Turkey for a few months back in 2020,” Choe said. “And I really wanted to get back to Turkey, improve my Turkish, get back to Istanbul. I really love the country, so I said yes.”

The program works with the American Research Institute in Turkey, a historical institute that welcomes students interested in the history of the Byzantine Empire or the Ottoman Empire. Choe worked on digitizing documents from the American Board of Missions in Turkey, which was active in the 19th century but dissolved in the 1960s due to underfunding.

“There was a Bible house in Constantinople, and that’s where most of the correspondence was going through,” Choe said. “So it was interesting to get a bit of a glimpse into what Turkey was like at that period in history.”

Choe said sometimes the letters held unusual content.

“One letter in particular that we had a bit of fun with had to do with a request for a shipment of ‘60 tons of coke.’ We were like, ‘Okay, is that Coke, as in Coca-Cola, cocaine, or the fuel?’” Choe said. “But for a second, we thought, ‘Oh, shoot, was there a drug operation being run out of the Bible house?’”

Choe said she enjoyed the program’s opportunity to teach her about the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey.

“It was a place where we got to see the remnants of two bygone empires,” Choe said. “I’d say that’s a part of the world and world history that maybe at Hillsdale we can often overlook when we’re focused on Western history.”

Tours, France

While Choe sampled Turkish culture, sophomore Sophia Kyba was speaking French in a four-week study abroad program in Tours, France. At language school Institut de Touraine, Kyba studied French at the second-most advanced level.

“I kept studying it all throughout high school, and I like reading books in French and listening to French music, so I decided to keep studying it in college and hopefully to be able to use it in work someday or at least for leisure,” Kyba said.

Kyba said Tours was the perfect size for immersive linguistics study.

“They say that that is the region where French is spoken most purely,” Kyba said. “It was definitely helpful when you are learning.”

Kyba and other Hillsdale students stayed with host families, where they spoke French from the moment they woke to the moment they went to sleep.

“The words come to mind quicker the more you speak with them,” Kyba said.

Kyba said her favorite part of each day would be finding her host parents on their terrace just before dinner, drinking wine and eating cheese.

“We would chat about the day or about other things,” Kyba said. “Those moments with my host family were probably the best part of the trip, or else we would play games or watch movies in French. They were super kind and welcoming.”

Kyba said her time made her more confident and interested in living abroad in the future.

“I was studying and going about day to day, doing things like taking the bus, doing normal things that people who live there do, as if I was just another person from Tours,” Kyba said.

 

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article spelled Würzburg incorrectly as Würtzberg.