After submitting my letter of interest to the German professor in charge of collecting applications, Dr.Smith, I was called in for an interview. This interview was between Dr.Smith, a representative from the Herz foundation, and Dr. Peterson who is another German professor, and me of course. The Joachim Herz foundation is instrumental for the German studies program at Kennesaw. They are dedicated to helping fund students’ trips abroad to Germany and have helped me out in the past with my summer in Germany.
This interview was the first one that I have ever done 100% in German. It was intimidating at first, but I got more comfortable once we got started. They asked me questions that I was not entirely prepared for, but I was surprisingly still able to find the correct vocabulary to properly communicate my answers in German as I would have in English.
The panel of interviewers asked me why I was interested in German and why I have stuck with it for nearly seven years. I explained to them my love for the friends that being a part of various German clubs and classes has brought me. I told them about how I wasn’t exactly a pro in the beginning and was actually close to dropping out of the program in high school, but thanks to great friends that I met on my first trip to Germany, I fell in love with the country and its language.
They then posed a question that brought me back to a week last summer where I was feeling depressed and found myself wanting to quit and go back home. They asked what I would do if I found myself in the “pit of despair” during my nearly eight months abroad next year. The pit of despair is the term that the department uses to describe a particular stage of the culture shock graph in which the person becomes very sad and lonely in their new country ( the deep dip labeled culture shock).
Culture shock was one of the things that I highlighted in my initial Paderborn blog post, so it was interesting to me that they would bring it up in our interview. I explained to them not only how I coped with my experience in the summer, but also that I had learned about it in my World Languages and Cultures class. I explained to them that we did an exercise called BaFaBa where we learned about culture shock and how to cope with it and in some cases avoid it.
Overall, I am very impressed with myself and how I performed in this interview. I received the email a few days ago congratulating me on my acceptance to the program. I will be interning with Herz over the summer and attending the University of Paderborn in the fall!
Laura The Explora 