Alyssa Zito, Moving the Cities: Germany Fall 2023
The advice I would give to other students planning to attend this program is to be prepared for a fast-paced program, and make sure to separate your days at school from your evenings exploring the city. For my trip, the program was held in the middle of October, half-way through the main semester, which meant it wasn’t too hard to put myself in a schoolwork state of mind. We were informed by the staff before the trip began that it would be a competitive weeklong program, which I would say resembled a “Hackathon”.
We had to wake up bright and early to get to the bus station by 8am. The mornings would start with a lecture while we ate a small breakfast. After the lecture we would be given our day long group tasks, and would spend the rest of the day completing design and brainstorming development activities, which would further us to help us arrive at our end pitch. For most of the activities we used sticky notes to help us brainstorm. It started off rocky with us each only using a couple sicky notes, but by the end we each had likely used over 100 sicky notes. We tested out different methods, either working together, or doing silent thoughts and regrouping.
By the end of the activities, we would typically travel to some company or event location where we would experience the different Germany businesses based around innovation and international connections, or a historic location for a tour. By the time we finished for the day it was typically between 6-8pm. Our staff informed us that most students would typically continue to work on their projects at the hostel, but that it’s good to give yourself a break so that you do not get burnt out.
With that being said, it was very important that once we left our school for that day, that we turned off the school and competition part of our brains, so that we would experience socializing and making casual international connections. Although we all were competing, after the class day ended, we all were friends, and the local students would take us to their favorite restaurants or night life areas. I think establishing quickly that after class we would not overly think about the program really helped us not get burned out and let us really experience the culture and the city, outside of the school life setting.
So overall, we were able to gain a good sense of what the attending school abroad was like during our days, and by communicating with students from all other countries, and we got to experience the social world of Germany, by spending our evenings exploring the city together as a big group.
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