by Amanda Dennis | Nov 13, 2019 | Alumni Perspective, International Opportunities |
By Kevin Medansky My name is Kevin Medansky, and I graduated from Haverford College this past May. After a stint in Iowa working on the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign this past summer, I moved to Paris, France, to pursue a Master’s at the Institute of Theater Studies of the Sorbonne Nouvelle and teach English at a local private high school called l’École alsacienne. For my Master’s, since I’m only in class for around nine hours each week, I’m mostly concentrating on my thesis. The quirky part about this program is that since my degree will be in Theater, not French, I have the liberty to study plays from across the world, including Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Hanoch Levin’s Krum, on which most of my analysis is centered. Nevertheless, all of my coursework, as well as my thesis, are entirely in French, so I still benefit from the language immersion environment I have long been hoping for. Otherwise, my work at l’École alsacienne has helped me test out teaching as a potential passion of mine. Each week, I teach twelve one-hour classes, spanning from seventh to twelfth grade. Since I have total autonomy in determining the curricula, I’ve developed three different syllabi for my classes. In my middle school classes, we spend each class with games and exercises aimed at helping them improve their vocabulary and grammar skills. This is quite reminiscent of my experience as a Teaching Assistant in the Bryn Mawr Department of French and Francophone Studies, and I’m grateful that those skills have transferred so easily. With a number of my high school classes,...
by Amanda Dennis | Apr 13, 2019 | Events, General, International Opportunities |
The CCPA is already gearing up for next year! Specifically, we are beginning to prepare students for the 2020-2021 Fullbright Fellowship applications. Will you be one of the students applying? Read on to discover what the Fulbright Fellowship Program is, who should apply, and where you can learn more! What is the Fulbright Fellowship Program? “The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides grants for individually designed study/research projects or English Teaching Assistant Programs. A candidate will submit a Statement of Grant Purpose defining activities to take place during one academic year in a participating country outside the U.S. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Through engagement in the community, the individual will interact with their hosts on a one-to-one basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom, thereby promoting mutual understanding. Grant lengths and dates vary by country. Please consult the specific country summary for details.” Source: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/about/fulbright-us-student-program Types of Awards Open Study/Research Awards: With this traditional award, candidates design a research project for a specific country. Read more here. English Teaching Assistant Awards: The English Teaching Assistant (ETA) awards match candidates with classrooms abroad where they will assist local English teachers and serve as a “Cultural ambassador for the U.S..” Read more here. Who should apply? Students can apply during their senior year...
by Amanda Dennis | Sep 26, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Liberal Arts, Student Perspective |
By Claire Burdick This summer I am a research intern in the Behavior Lab at the Saint Louis Zoo. A typical day for me involves collecting data from live and video observations and analyzing data from previous projects. For each study, all of the interns have to take a series of different reliability tests to make sure that we are all collecting data in a consistent way. I start each day by scoring video for a long-term project on mother-infant interactions in several antelope species. The purpose of this study is to learn more about how antelopes in captivity interact with their offspring and how different parenting styles might affect infant outcomes. Twice a day, I head out on grounds to help collect data on the current live observation projects. We are doing a study on the zoo’s new grizzly bears, Huckleberry and Finley, observing their general behavior to see how they are spending their time and how they are using their exhibit. We use a tablet to record what each bear is doing, how close they are to each other, and where each bear is in the exhibit every minute for an hour. Some days I head to the zoo’s primate house with another intern to observe Coquerel’s sifaka, black-handed spider monkeys, and guereza colobus to collect baseline data of general behavior for a study on how noise affects their behavior. The third live study this summer is on the chimpanzees, and we observe the three males in the group because a new male was introduced this summer. We collected data during the introduction process and are...
by Jennifer Barr | Jun 28, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Internships, Liberal Arts, Networking, Student Perspective |
By Bilge Yilmaz One of these pink-filtered, cloudy Paris mornings, I wake up to a simple workday. I take the subway line 8 to République, then 11 to Place des Fêtes, and arrive at the Blogo offices. Paris has an impressive rail system. I seat myself by my desk, right across two walls, respectively decorated with various posters of “Soirées de Poche” and with simple illustrations done by markers: Beirut, Kings of Convenience, Low, My Brightest Diamond, Electric Guest, Bon Iver, Andrew Bird, St. Vincent, Local Natives… It’s as if someone sneaked into my Spotify to curate this series. Everyone whistles the catchy intro to Arcade Fire’s Everything Now today. No complaints. The post-production process of their Paris concert’s footage from April is about to be over. Awaiting the final cut, we hear parts of the recording from the video room. Plus, it’s *finally* not raining today. Speaking and hearing French daily is a little bit harsh on me, but I will get through it. I start the day by going through all the very old videos on La Blogothèque’s website to help archive them. I rummage through music-hungry, passionate articles, and detect which ones are missing videos in good quality. Not your typical HD from 2000s camcorders, but so much technique, history – so many layers. In the early afternoon, we head to a studio to make an interview recording with the respected French artist Yves Simon, he tells stories of Zelda Fitzgerald. I accompany a small crew of a director, a sound engineer, an assisting producer, and Bedouine, a Middle Eastern descent singer-songwriter, as we go off to...
by Jennifer Barr | Jun 6, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Internships, Liberal Arts, Student Perspective |
By Dayana Davila This summer I will be interning at Penn Medicine as a clinical research assistant in a primary care setting with Dr. Carmen Guerra. Though I do not begin until July 9th, over the past semester, spring 2018, I participated in CIEE’s service-learning program through which I was able to gain valuable experience that I will apply during my summer internship. As part of this service-learning program, I was placed at Victoria Hospital, a public hospital, in order to complete the “service” aspect of my program. Though the purpose of my “service” at Victoria was to complete a research-based project, the first two weeks were dedicated to shadowing and immersing myself into the culture at Victoria Hospital. As a pre-med student, I was beyond eager for the opportunity to shadow alongside doctors and medical students as they went along their daily duties. It is important to note that Victoria Hospital is a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Cape Town (UCT), meaning there is a constant flow of final-year medical students rotating in and out of each medical department as they finalize their clinical studies. This was of a great benefit to me because I was able to fit right in as an observer amongst all the medical students that went through the rounds each morning, although I was often confused for a medical student Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I arrived to Victoria Hospital at 7:30 am for the beginning of the morning rounds, which usually ended around 11 am. On a typical morning at 7:30 am the consultant doctor, registrar doctors, and medical students...
by Jennifer Barr | May 24, 2018 | Career Exploration, General, International Opportunities, Internships, Student Perspective |
CCPA Note: Today’s blog starts our annual summer series, where Haverford students funded through college sponsored opportunities share their experiences. We are so excited for the series to begin, and look forward to an exciting summer ahead! By Yifan Zhang This summer, I have the amazing opportunity to excavate a medieval cemetery on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Haagerup archaeological campaign is organized by the Unit of Anthropology (ADBOU) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and I will be working with bioarchaeologists from SDU and Penn State. Through participating in this exciting project, I will gain valuable fieldwork experience and learn bioarchaeological knowledge that is not taught at Haverford. What’s more, few things could be more rewarding than personally contributing to an international research project alongside leading scholars in the field! All of these are made possible by the generosity of Ms. Deborah Lafer-Scher and the kind support from CCPA, for which I am genuinely thankful. Haagerup cemetery was abandoned after the Protestant Reformation in Denmark and was in use for approximately five centuries, serving a local rural parish. Archaeologists estimate that there are 3000 burials in this site. So what can we learn from studying thousands of skeletons? Skeletal remains are fascinating carriers of information. When other organic materials and soft tissues have decomposed, bones persist in the soil. Not only do they provide us with the demographic profile of past populations, but diet, epidemic, disease, famine, and violence also leave marks on the bone. Numerous interesting questions, which are otherwise mysteries, can now be answers with the information we collect from the skeletal remains. Personally,...
