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Backpacks

Posted by | Posted on August 11, 2012
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“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” 
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

My classmates, my professor, and a camel in the Empty Quarter

I never considered that I may be absolutely terrible at packing until this summer.  In high school I would show up for travel with only a backpack I’d had since fifth grade, and I used to pride myself on having the least amount of luggage of anyone on my teams.  When I started traveling cross-country to college this all changed. I couldn’t just sling a backpack with a few changes of clothes, my case binder, and my laptop onto my back; now I had to survive away from home for months.  There’s not a backpack big enough for that. I tried to keep some of my habits from high school and take only the bare minimum, but as time went on at Hopkins I found that things just would not fit in my bags anymore.  Coming back home for winter break I had difficulty trying to take the important things back to Vegas with me, and coming back to Hopkins after spring break I was finally faced with the possibility that I’d accumulated an awful lot of things since moving in nine months previously.  After finishing my final paper, I looked around my room and realized I couldn’t take it all with me.  Fast-forward two months, and I was sitting in my hotel room in Oman with my roommate looking at a pile of toiletries  candy, and clothing that was not making it back to the States with us.  Both times there was a mad rush to pack, saying goodbyes, and something inevitably got left behind.  The Muscat International Airport is now one five-pound Arabic dictionary richer due to my overweight luggage, and somewhere in Baltimore my giant stuffed triceratops has found another home.

My classmates and the US Ambassador to Oman.

Since graduating high school, I feel as though I have been constantly leaving places, taking things with me, and inevitably leaving things behind.  It’s been an incredible blessing and a curse.  Less than a century ago the odds were good that both myself and everyone reading this blog would have stayed within fifty miles of where they were born.  Less than twenty years ago the odds were good that both myself and everyone reading this blog wouldn’t have the ability to email people from around the world.  Less than a year ago the odds were good that I would have called you crazy if you told me that I was going to fly for twenty-five hours over the course of three days to get home from Oman.  I live in probably the most mobile and global period in history and I feel as though moving around is a fact of life I have to face sooner or later, especially in my given field of study.  I’m lucky to have been given the choice to leave, given how many people around the world lack the opportunities I have been presented and do not have a choice in the matter when they leave their homes, but it’s never easy.  Like my 15 year old self packing for a 45-minute flight to northern Nevada, I try to cram everything in my backpack so I can take it with me, but I always end up having to leave something behind and hope that I can get by without it and pick up something better in my next destination.  My Hopkins debate and mock trial teams replaced the ones I’d had in high school.  I replaced a book I’d brought with me to Oman for an Arabic version of A Tale of Two Cities.  I’ll switch out the greenery of the Hopkins campus with the urban campus of Columbia.

JHU Mock Trial freshman at our first tournament.

As everyone knows, though, there are certain things that are irreplaceable.  Certain things will never leave your backpack when you travel: the good luck charm, the Spring Fair picture where all your friends look sunburnt and full on fried food, the memory of that one time you sang Bohemian Rhapsody to a group of confused Omanis (immediately put this on your bucket list.)  In a Frank Sinatra song that I, of course, have never been made to listen to by the Italian New Yorker side of my family during Yankee games, there’s a line about the narrator making a “brand new start of it” in New York.  I don’t think this is a good idea.  You can’t wipe your past or erase your memories, Jim Carrey movies notwithstanding, and furthermore why would you want to do that?  Good, bad, or ugly, my past got me into Hopkins, to Oman, and now to Columbia.  Those reading the blog as admitted students can sit back this summer and know that what they did got them into one of the best universities in the world, and current students know it too.  Perhaps my history-loving side shows too much, or my nostalgia, but there are things that are too important to ever leave behind, mostly my friends and family, but also my experiences.  People, especially prefrosh, often talk about wanting a “clean state” before leaving for college, and I was always really unsure what that meant.  Is a “clean slate” simply not focusing too much on the kid you were before, in high school, or is it throwing what you did away in exchange for adopting some new cool “college kid” persona?  One is not focusing and the other is completely forgetting, and I know which route I would pick, I did pick, and I will pick.

JHU debate

The people I met at Hopkins are definitely part of the irreplaceable part of my backpack.  Certainly, Hopkins is an excellent school with excellent faculty and excellent classes, but the things that stick with me the most about my year here are things that happened outside of class.  It’s the people, and not the subject matter, that makes learning so interesting, and I think this applies inside and outside the classroom.  Staying up all night patrolling the hallways of a hotel isn’t a fun subject, but couple it with the people in Model UN and it becomes a night to remember.  Debating welfare reform is dull, but when that debate happens after a night spent driving in circles around New Jersey, missing your exit five times, and replacing a flat tire you’ll be sure to laugh whenever you think of it.  Coming back home, exhausted, after a mock trial tournament is nothing to write home about, unless you open your room to find two of your closest friends sitting on your floor having a Netflix marathon.  Group meetings can be dull, unless your group is SAAB and there are copious amounts of camaraderie and free Chipotle.

The videographers.

I could talk about the opportunities given to me at Hopkins, and there were so many of them, but I think if you’re reading this blog you know about the opportunities available to Hopkins students.  I think sometimes schools focus so much on all the incredible opportunities available to their students, like study abroad, internships, and research, that they sort of cover up the fact that the glue that holds a campus together and makes that school what it is isn’t the programs; it’s the people.  For those going off to college in the fall, you will probably be told that you can pick two out of the following three: sleep, grades, and social life.  Anyone who knows me or who read this blog can probably guess which two I picked, but when you’ve got a paper due tomorrow and you need to talk to someone, is your REM cycle going to answer back?  When you move to a new city, are you going to call up that B you got in orgo and ask it if it wants to grab Thai food?  When you’ve got limited space in your backpack, your friends and family are worth their weight in gold.  You can Facebook chat with your friend across the world while Skyping your brother across the country and texting your old roommate about her winter break plans.  Why waste that?

The Snuggie Party when I got back from my first debate tournament

As I close this year of blogging and throw it into my overburdened backpack that I will be lugging to Broadway and 113th Street next year, I want to express how happy I was to have this opportunity to blog, interact with prospective students, and reflect on my freshman year.  The concept of the self-made man is one I’ve never subscribed to, as I know that I would be nowhere without numerous people believing in me, helping me, and supporting me the past few years.  I’d like to thank those people spread out around the world from the bottom of my heart, and know that whatever I type in this last paragraph cannot even begin to express my gratitude.  As I leave, I really don’t think there is a way to describe the feeling without using the cliche “a mixed bag of emotions.”  I’m happy, and just a tiny bit sad, but I am undoubtably very lucky to have had something at Hopkins that makes saying goodbye so hard.

When my group left Oman, one of my professors told us that they knew when we arrived that they would be saying goodbye to us in just a few short months.  ”But,” he said, as we all crowded around the hall of our hotel that had served as a combination lounge/film studio/library/dinning hall/soccer field for two months, “we will not say goodbye.  It is too hard.  Instead, we will say, ‘See you soon.””

See you soon, everyone.

 

SAAB Class of 2015 a year ago.

 

Everyone is Weird and So Are You

Posted by | Posted on July 13, 2012
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My midterm in Modern Standard Arabic was a little over a week ago, and since that time I’ve been to a wedding, gone to a bowling alley on the 4th of July, and just got back from camping in the Empty Quarter.  I have a little over two weeks left in Oman before a period of 24 hours where I will be flying almost nonstop.  In my last post  I talked about the difficulties of identifying yourself and how from Hopkins to the Strait of Hormuz the way you choose to identify yourself will never tell the whole story.  As move-in day for the Class of 2016 draws ever closer, I remember one of the biggest worries on my mind this time last year was that I was really weird compared to my new classmates.  I wondered if I was going to leave my high school environment and come to a place where I wouldn’t fit in because I came from a weird town and I looked fourteen and I really, really liked watching dubbed Disney movies.   But as I met more and more of my fellow classmates, I noticed something: everyone was both very interesting and very interested in their new classmates.  There was never a quiet moment at meals or in our rooms as we tried to learn everything we could about our roommates, suite-mates, hall-mates, classmates, and de facto Chipotle-deliverers.  Things I thought would be considered strange were barely questioned, while things that were normal to me raised some eyebrows (and I’m not talking about “Vegas normal” here where slot machines in grocery stores make sense.)  I said that my family didn’t decorate with wreathes on Christmas, and my roommate confessed that she really loved opera.  There was a mutual respect in the fledgling Class of 2015 and the established Hopkins community that let you realize two things: 1. you did some things that other people thought were weird 2. everyone else did really weird stuff as well but it was just so interesting.

In a way this experience has repeated in Oman.  Even before we board our plane from D.C., thirty Americans ranging in age from 18 to mid-thirties had to quickly get to know each other.  Even within the same country we’re all so different, so weird, and so wonderful.  ”Why are you calling a soda a pop?”  ”You lived in Morocco for how long?”

When we landed in Oman and met the university students who would be speaking to us every day to improve our Arabic, the questions continued.  ”You live in Maryland?  Is that the same as New York?”  ”What is supposed to be fun about an Easter egg hunt?”  The questions always made you think about things you’d never thought about before, like why on Earth people hide eggs on Easter and make small children hunt for them in some strange Hunger Games-esque competition to win the egg hunt and eternal glory/a chocolate bunny.  We also got to ask our own questions, like “What do you do for fun?” “What’s the deal with all this frankincense?”  We were asked to describe things (in Arabic naturally) about ourselves, our hometowns, our families.  In turn, any questions we had about Oman were answered.  Things I’ve learned since coming here:

 

Camels are the leading cause of traffic accidents

There are no napkins, only tissues in boxes.

In Arabic you don’t play the drums, you knock on them.

There are two types of dates: young dates (called rutub and I’ve never seem them before in the States) and older dates (caller temer and better than any I’ve seen before in the States).

It is common to signal “Wait a minute” by pinching your thumb and other fingers together and beckoning by moving your wrist toward yourself repeatedly.  This is not at all the same gesture I’ve ever seen used in America (where you put  up a finger or a hand.)

Western pop music is huge here., which lead to an Adele sing-along en route to the Empty Quarter this past weekend.

 

"Spicy tomato sauce" is salsa. Also the tortilla chips were Doritos.

 

Things by Omani friends have found strange:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches.  They do not even sell grape jelly in supermarkets (they do sell rose jelly, though!)

The concept of tortilla chips and salsa.  There is a sauce they serve with rice that is exactly like a thin salsa, but tortilla chips are pretty scarce.

Tanning.  In general Omanis find pale skin attractive, so much so that most beauty products have whitening agents built into them.  Several of the girls at the university were shocked to hear that Americans will use-self tanners and lay out on the beach in order to get darker.

British accents.

Maple syrup on pancakes.  They have honey but it’s just not the same.

Swag.  Swag certainly exists in Oman and is exhibited, most notably by one of our professors, but any attempt to accurately define “swag” is complex so we have taken to just saying “swag” at every applicable circumstance in the hopes that the word will be as etherial in meaning and as overused as it is in English.

Me in an abaya and hijab after a traditional wedding we attended.

While my previous blog talked a lot about changing identity, I think it’s also important to realize that even if the way you identify yourself changes you’ll still run into situations where you think things might be strange.  Maybe it’s your first day at a new office, maybe you just moved, or maybe you mispronounced a word and ended up being driven to a post office instead of a beach.  It’s going to be awkward at first to try to interact with people when you think you might not have a lot in common, but I think everyone (not just the Class of 2016, although this advice will be helpful come Orientation) could benefit from both recognizing their own weirdness in the eyes of another person and being genuinely curious about the different habits of others.  In a diverse group like CLS Arabic or Johns Hopkins Class of 2016 it’s bound to be awkward at first, and there will inevitably come a time when you can’t wrap your head around something (like “swag” or being handed a box of Kleenex at a restaurant) but as long as you keep an open mind you’ll learn some interesting stuff and hopefully make a new friend or two in the process!

 

I was walking out of lunch when one of the students at the university approached me.  She’d been sitting at the table next to me and asking the American students about American colloquialisms because we’d been asking her about Omani dialect compared to Modern Standard Arabic.  As she drew level with me, she told me that one of the Americans had taught her Janoobi (Southern) American Dialect and that she thought it sounded awesome.  As a West Coaster descended from two New Yorkers, all I could do was tell her that it was very different from my accent/dialect (I didn’t want to get into an explanation of that beloved West Coast adjective known as hella) and I felt like I probably wouldn’t know enough about Southern accents to really understand what she was saying.

She smiled back, stuck out her hand, and said, “What a’ do?”

It was weird.  It was wonderful.

 

 

 

What Should We Call Me?

Posted by | Posted on June 28, 2012
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Since arriving for orientation in Washington, D.C. about a month ago the one phrase I have heard the most when describing what my summer would be like is “remember that you’re not in America anymore”.  It struck me as really self-obvious at first.  Well duh we weren’t going to be in America.  We were going to a place where everyone spoke Arabic (except not really) that was going to be quite conservative (except when this song was playing in the supermarket a block from our hotel)  and probably really hot (except when it wasn’t.)  In contrast, we were coming from America, where hardly anyone speaks Arabic, (except the roughly 1 million who do) women don’t wear hijab, (except for those who do) and Islam doesn’t have a huge presence (except for the 2.6 million Muslims in the United States).

I think the first problem with reminding our group that we weren’t in America anymore is that no one told us to be on the lookout for the similarities we’d see.  We hit the ground with some of us expecting something completely different and got air conditioning, KFC, and Wi-Fi along with the call to prayer, the smell of frankincense, and the Omani sweet called helwa (like a super super sweet jello-type thing but not really).  There are a lot of differences, certainly.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable rocking a v-neck and shorts but I’m also not required to cover my hair outside of holy sites or wear an abaya.   The eggs in the supermarket aren’t refrigerated, there are skin bleaching products instead of tanning ones, and my roommate is one of about three blondes in the entire town.  But I would argue that there have been more similarities than differences.  The day we learned a traditional Omani dance and one of my classmates found that it was identical to one her family does in Eritrea.  The time our professor confessed to having watched the Lord of the Rings movies a dozen times each and asked my roommate for a copy of the soundtracks.  The session where a classmate asked a speaking partner how to say, “Ouch” in Arabic and the speaking partner replied, “It’s very complicated.  You say ‘Ouch.’”

I think the second problem with the thought that Oman or any other country is defined as “not America” is that the definition of America depends completely on who you talk to.  I was asked what the American identity was in a class and knew that I couldn’t even begin to answer that in English, much less Arabic, only managing to get out that America is diverse because some people are of European descent, some from Africa, some from Asia, some live in the city, and some live in the country.  What I couldn’t say in Arabic was that for some classmates here Oman feels more comfortable than the United States, (one of my classmates is excited to go through a week of Ramadan and not be one of the few people she knows that is fasting) for some classmates going to different regions in America would be like traveling to another country, and for some classmates America was the single town they’d grown up in their whole life.

Then, if you make it past trying to wrap your head around another country as being a “not America” without having an existencial crisis, you end up getting asked The Question.  The Question is what you will be asked an awful lot if you don’t look like you know where you’re going, if you look out of place, or if you’re carrying a heavy bag (ie. any traveling situation or during Freshman Orientation.)  The Question seems very simple at first, and for some people maybe the answer is really easy, but as time goes on it’s getting harder and harder to answer succinctly.

The Question is “Where are you from?”

Exhibit A: Kindergarden.  I was frankly terrible at Kindergarden (is it possible for a child to not understand naps, Hooked on Phonics, or the proper way to hold a pencil and still turn out okay?  The answer is maybe not because that child was me.) Teacher asks The Question.  I say that I was born on Long Island.  It’s sufficiently exotic-sounding enough that I’m cool for like a day until everyone finds out that Long Island isn’t a tropical island but is basically New York but not the cool part.  No one says I look like anything but a mop of curly hair over Disney-themed clothing.

Exhibit B: High school.  I move from a public school to a Catholic one.  I get asked The Question and say that I’m from a public school.  My Spanish teacher asks The Question, I answer, and she says I look “Hispanic” (whatever that means).  My religion teacher asks only at the end of the year and adds that she thought I looked “Jewish” (whatever that means).  I start trying to figure out what on Earth I “look like” because everyone seems to think something different.  I go to Jordan and get mistaken for one of the Jordanian students traveling with the American group.  A kid at a debate tournament after a round about Iran sanctions swears that I must be part Persian.

Exhibit C: Freshman Move-In Day.  I meet all three criteria for being asked The Question and my RA is nice so of course it’s a nice icebreaker.  I chirp, “Las Vegas”, get the expected “What’s it like over there?”, and everything’s cool.  There is a weird period where I feel the need to add “But I was born in New York!” to this explanation but I quickly drop that.  Then there are certain people who ask me The Question after I’ve known them for a while and I add that I’m Puerto Rican and Italian so they don’t have to guess.

Exhibit D: Oman.  My choice to not wear abaya or headscarf automatically pegs me as an outsider, someone who isn’t from around here and for better or worse isn’t going to try to hide it, and The Question pops up often.  ”I was a student at Johns Hopkins,”  I reply, because I haven’t been in Las Vegas for more than five consecutive days since December.  I grew up there, but I don’t know if I’m from there anymore.  ”I’m studying at Columbia University next semester.”  School affiliations have trumped geographical location, and now country of origin speculations run wild.  ”I’m American” I insist.  ”But you look Persian/Syrian/Greek/Jordanian/Egyptian!  You do not look American!  Where are you from?”

“لا, لا أنا من أصل الايطالية و بورتوريكو و أعيش في أمريكا”

“No, no I’m of Italian and Puerto Rican descent and I live in America.”

I think that’s probably the most succinct, and thus most inaccurate, way to answer The Question. Because 1) it’s way too broad and makes me sound like I’m in West Side Story and 2) it tells you nothing about me, just like saying that Oman is not America tells you nothing about what it’s like.  It makes you stay on high alert for even minute differences instead of focusing on the similarities between people, and what you consider to be Italian-American or Puerto Rican-American or Las Vegan or Baltimorean culture is extremely subjective.  Lumping people into groups is a great way to draw borders around groups instead of letting people cross those borders on the basis of a common dance or dish or idiom.  Identities are fickle things, I know I’ve changed mine an awful lot for someone under the age of twenty, and I really hope that I’m not the only one that’s done this because it would make me feel like I wasn’t doing something important if it didn’t make me question a lot of preconceived notions I had.

I was speaking to one of my professors after giving a presentation about the origins and traditions of Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day.  I tried to explain to him in Arabic what a leprechaun was, and he said it was like a jinn.  I tried to not think of the genie from Aladdin (because apparently that’s not an accurate portrayal of a jinn)  and nodded.  I said goodbye in Arabic, and he said something I didn’t understand.

“Could you repeat that?”

“Legen….” he looked up at me expectantly.  My mind scrambled to remember what “legen” ment in Arabic and how I was supposed to answer.

“I don’t know that word,” I finally said.

“Of course you do.  Legen. . . ”  I just looked at him blankly.  ”Legen. . .wait for it. . . .”

“. . .dary?”  I finished weakly.

He beamed.  ”I love How I Met Your Mother!  Do you watch it?  Challenge accepted!”

I definitely think that when I get asked about the people of Oman, I’ll have a lot to say in Arabic, and I’ll know how to say that I don’t know what to call them because there’s no way to sum them up.  What should we call them?  I’ll wonder.  What should we call me?  I can’t call them one simple name, so I’ll just have to use stories.  A lot of them will be about Eritrean-esque traditional Omani dances, authentic Lebanese food served by Egyptians, and my professor watching Neil Patrick Harris suit up in the house near his date farm.


 

The View from Salalah

Posted by | Posted on June 13, 2012
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Picture of the beach at night.

 

It’s the end of my first full week in Salalah and just two days ago I found out that I have a four day weekend!  In addition to the normal weekend in Oman (Thursday and Friday, dubbed “Emotional Saturday” and “Emotional Sunday” by my classmates) this weekend is extra long because Oman, like many other Muslim countries, celebrates al-Isra’aa wa al-Mi’raj, the Prophet Muhammad’s ascension to Heaven.  So for this week I have both the Omani weekend (Thursday and Friday) and normal Western weekend (Saturday and Sunday) off!  It’s a nice way to end a jam-packed week in Salalah.

A beach in Salalah (no swimming allowed, though!)

Much of my previous entry on my summer in the Gulf was a reflection on how I ended up sitting on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia, but since that time there’s been little time to dwell on the past as we’ve gone straight into our classes.  The CLS Salalah group is made up of 30 students from all over the United States and at different educational levels (this specific Arabic site is for intermediate and advanced beginning students, but we still have everything from freshman to Ph.D candidates in our classes.)  One thing I’m very happy about is that both the CLS program and Hopkins really do their best to create a very diverse class to expose students to a lot of different opinions, strengths, people, etc.  If I wanted to surround myself with people just like me I’d live in a room full of mirrors, but it’s really nice to learn so many interesting things just from sitting down and talking to your classmates.  I learned how to wash my own laundry from a Peace Corps member here on this trip, similar to the way I learned to do laundry at Hopkins by going to the basement of AMR I with a group of my friends, acting very nonchalant because we were now adults who did their laundry, and finally getting help from a friend who’d done laundry before and took pity on us .

Salalah is the second largest city in Oman after the capital, Muscat, and is known for being a very popular tourist destination in the Gulf.  Why?  Because it’s just so darn hot in a desert and no one seems to do desert quite like the Gulf.  Salalah is on the coast and very close to the equator, but from mid-June until late in the summer a very nice cooling mist cloaks the entire region.  This mist is made possible by something known locally as Al-Khareef, which is sort of a rain-bearing fog (two words I still have to wrap my head around when I’m outside Vegas) that is so beloved by desert-dwellers that there’s an entire festival celebrating the moisture.  While the town’s population swells to include citizens of other Gulf states during the festival, Salalah is quite diverse in general as a former trading city on the ancient frankincense trading route with links to India, the Middle East, the Gulf, and Africa.  Walk a block from the hotel our group is staying at and you’ll pass by Turkish food, Indian clinics, Urdu-speaking shopkeepers, and a place selling chicken fingers and pizzas called “Chick Hut” next to a supermarket where music from the Black Eyed Peas blasts late at night.

The pillars of the ruins of a mosque.

I’m in class from nine until four daily, with classes split into Modern Standard Arabic, (the written and formal form of Arabic) Media Arabic, (where we learn words to talk about politics and current events)  and Omani Dialect Arabic.  There are an awful lot of Arabic dialects, and speakers of Arabic will often easily switch from the more standard and formalized Modern Standard when writing a letter or giving a speech to talking in a dialect when speaking with their friends, so many institutions are now requiring that students studying Arabic study both MSA and a dialect of their choice (major ones include Egyptian and Levantine, which are taught in the textbook used for Arabic at Hopkins.)  In addition to a traditional small class setting (there are about 13 people in my class, which is a little more than were in both my Persian and Arabic classes at Hopkins) I’m also assigned a language partner to speak with during lunch, in special conversation time periods, and on cultural excursions in and around Salalah (we went to a market, or souq, the other day to learn about traditional clothes and perfumes.)

A set of stairs in the ruins. This used to be a citadel.

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of work, but before we left from D.C. there was an alumni panel of past Oman travelers who stressed the importance of getting out and seeing the city while we were there, (do I sense an Omani version of Learn More, See More, B’More on the way?) so my group of friends has made a promise to go sightseeing every weekend while we’re here.  This past week the group went to a beach resort (no swimming allowed due to super rough waves during this time of the year) and the ruins of a city near Salalah that was once a massive port for the frankincense trade and was visited by Ibn Battuta.  We’ve spent a lot of time in various restaurants and souqs as well, and a few of my friends have picked up some nice souvenirs for back home like frankincense, daggers, abayas, perfumes, etc.  There’s an excursion planned for this weekend as well, so hopefully my trusty iPhone camera carries me through this trip!

 

Summer in the Gulf

Posted by | Posted on June 4, 2012
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After moving myself out of my dorm (which is a nice way to say “give away half your possessions because no human being was supposed to move out using airplane baggage limits”) and spending a few days back home, I’m now typing this blog from my beddroom in Salalah, Oman!  I hadn’t even heard of the country before I was chosen for intensive language study there with the US Department of State, but after a few days of orientation in Washington, D.C. and Muscat, Oman I’ve learned a few things:

http://images.nationmaster.com/images/motw/middle_east_and_asia/oman_rel96.jpg

1. Oman is one of the most stable and well-developed countries in the Middle East

2. Oman is located in the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula and is bordered by the United Arab Emerites, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

3. Oman is a Sultanate under the leadership of Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, who has ruled as the country has rapidly modernized beginning in the 1970′s.  Unlike many Middle Eastern countries, Oman has never been colonized (certain powers held onto costal forts, but the country as a whole has never been colonized.)

This is never a good idea.

4. I’ve finally learned how to sleep on planes!

 

In-flight entertainment includes roommate Stephanie and future Columbia classmate Shamm reading an Arabic newspaper.

I’ve been on seven flights and flown over 24 hours in the last two weeks, so needless to say I am a little tired, out of shape, and cranky. I actually hate flying but it’s the price you pay when you live on the West Coast, go to college on the East Coast, and happen to be an international relations major.  Until they invent teleportation, I have to make due with packing a dozen DVDs to distract me during flights.  Thankfully the international flights we took to get to Oman, one from D.C. to Germany and the next from Germany to the capital of Oman, Muscat, with a stopover in Saudi Arabia, had excellent in-flight entertainment.  I was able to catch up on some movies that I’d always wanted to see, made the Benadryl-influenced decision to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks Three: Chipwrecked, and wondered how a kid from Las Vegas had ended up sitting on a tarmac in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia waiting for the plane taking her to Oman to receive clearance for takeoff.

Saudi Arabia from the plane.

I guess like a lot of things it all starts with high school debate.  My debate coach near the end of my junior year told me about a program called Four Star Debate, a debate and leadership program with General Tommy Franks that paired American debaters from across the country and had them discuss and debate an important issue. That year, King Abdullah II of Jordan decided to repay Tommy Franks for allowing several Jordanian students to come to Four Star Debate in America by inviting 24 American students for a debate tournament in Jordan.  I applied for the program and got in.  That’s the end of a story in which I met a king and listened to the Indiana Jones theme song while riding a Jeep in Wadi Rum and the beginning of all the other crazy stories about adventures in Arabic, Persian, international relations…everything.   I’ve never been a huge believer in one day waking up and knowing exactly what you want to do, mostly because whenever I wake up I always know that exactly what I want to do is to sleep more and eat and career prospects for both are quite limited unless you nab a job as a professional food taster or bed tester.  However, that trip was the beginning of the general direction of my studies.  That trip, weirdly, enough was also the first time I’d ever been outside the country.  Oman will be only my second time outside the country.

 

So, as I’ve touched upon in previous blogs, I took Arabic and Persian this year and decided on the third day of school to head down to the study abroad office and ask about applying for the Critical Language Scholarship, a program sponsored by the US Department of State and designed to increase the number of Americans who know a critical language such as Arabic, Persian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Urdu, etc.  I’m not trying to humble-brag when I say I was sure I wasn’t going to get in to the program, but considering that I didn’t even have a college transcript at that time and was up against grad students I was certain that this was not going to happen.  Then it did.  It didn’t really hit me until I was on the plane heading to orientation in Washington, D.C. that in the span of less than three weeks I’d have wrapped up a year at college with a 4.0, transferred, and flown over 8,000 miles.  It would be disingenuous of me to say that it was all luck, (there were a lot of stressful nights) and I would also be lying if I said that I didn’t have perhaps a bit of sheer dumb luck this whole year.

Reflections aside, now I’m in Oman.  It was extremely hot in the capital, Muscat, with weather very similar to that of Las Vegas, but since we’ve arrived in the smaller southern city of Salalah the weather has been very humid and significantly cooler.  Since arriving the 30 other students studying Arabic with me have spent a lot of time exploring the cities and going on tours, and I guess the best way to try to showcase this country is to stop typing and just let the pictures speak for themselves.  Here’s to a summer in the Gulf!

The view from my hotel room in Muscat.

The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat

The mosque from the outside.

 

*The views expressed in this blog are my own and are not endorsed by the US Department of State, CAORC, etc.

 

 

 

 

Leaving the Nest Part II

Posted by | Posted on May 20, 2012
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“I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, and they didn’t.”

J. R. R. Tolkien

In my last blog post I talked about how tricky it is to guess where you’ll physically be in the futu bre but how easy it is to know that your state of mind as a Hopkins student will always make you up for a challenge.  I talked about how hard it was going to be to leave Hopkins for a summer and a semester to take classes in Oman and Washington, D.C..  I talked about how while I didn’t know where I’d physically be in the future, if I’d elect to apply for the 5 year BA/MA program with SAIS or if I’d study abroad for a semester, I knew where I was mentally and I knew I was ready for whatever challenges were ahead of me.

Four days after I wrote that blog post, I was accepted into Columbia University as a Fall 2012 transfer.

Six days after I wrote that blog post, I accepted the offer.

 

The news was as shocking to me as it probably is for anyone reading this blog, so first I’d like to clear some things up:

Stained glass at the Hut

1. My previous blog posts talking about how much I loved my time at Hopkins were genuine.  I’ve honestly enjoyed my time here immensely and when I try to picture what my freshman year could have been like at another college I honestly can’t because, as JHU_Erica eloquently put it in one of her blogs, Hopkins has become my university.  I was able to tailor my schedule to fit my interests (mostly, which will be discussed in a bit), I made a lot of awesome friends (friends who have had my back without question throughout this whole transfer decision making process), and even if I close my eyes and try to picture what life would have been freshman year at any college I applied as a transfer to, I can’t imagine it being any better than at Hopkins.

2.Even once I decided to apply to transfer, I went along with my semester as though I would be staying at Hopkins for at least another four years.  The only people who knew about the transfer were my parents, my academic advisor, a very small number of friends outside Hopkins, and a few professors I asked for letters of recommendation. This was done for two reasons: A) the admit rate for transfer students at the schools I applied to are drastically lower than the admit rate for first-year students, and I had been rejected as a freshman from most schools that I was applying to as a transfer.  B) even if I was accepted as a transfer, I was not 100% certain that I would take the offer.  Hopkins had so many oppertunities to offer that it made no sense to me to go around my second semester and turn down oppertunities left and right if the chances of me transfering were very low and I wasn’t quite sure if I’d want to leave at the end of the year.

Gilman at Hopkins

With all this being said, I think the question everyone (including myself) has is “Why are you leaving?  Don’t you like it here?”  I’m sure there are other kids leaving Hopkins with me just like I’m sure there are kids leaving Columbia.  I’m sure we all have our reasons for leaving.  Maybe people want to move closer to home.  Maybe our current schools are too big or too small or too urban or too rural.  Maybe some people honestly hate their current schools.  I almost feel like it would be a lot easier if I could hate this year, because then I’d be in a position similar to the end of senior year where I wasn’t really leaving anything behind when I left.  It’s always easier to do something when you don’t really have a choice but to leave, but what made this decision so tough is that it wasn’t like my senior year.  I wasn’t counting down the days until I wouldn’t have to deal with people asking why I didn’t go to prom or when I wouldn’t have to work on chemistry homework that was assigned on the last day of school.  When I received my third college acceptance ever on May 10, I  was applying for internships in Washington, D.C. and texting one of my friends to see if she wanted to get food at Carma’s.  Before I got that email I’d interacted with prospective students at Hopkins who were deciding between colleges and could never really understand what they were going through because I’d really never had multiple good options for college before, and I would always tell them, “Well you can’t make a bad choice now.”  My own words came back to haunt me and I suddenly realized why all those prospective students had such a hard time making their choices and why my words were of absolutely no help to them: if there were bad choices and a clear good choice, you wouldn’t be questioning your decision because things would be clear.  When all options seem good there’s no magical Gordian Knot-esque moment where you come to a quick and easy solution.

College Walk at Columbia

So why am I leaving if I love it here?  Simply put, my freshman year at Hopkins allowed me to explore subject areas I never would have been able to study in high school or at any other university that I was accepted to.  These subject areas, primarily international relations and Modern Middle Eastern Studies, really intrigued me and I wanted to focus on these areas after learning a bit about them in certain introductory classes.  For my second semester this year I tried to fill my schedule with classes focusing on international relations with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies, but ran into a lot of difficulties.  There were no political science classes being taught about current issues in the Middle East, forcing me to take an Israeli literature class that was cross-listed with political science.  I signed up for a Persian class that I later found out would not be offered again in subsequent years, which left me confused due to SAIS’ strength in international relations.  I continued with my Arabic and found an excellent class on Sociology of Religious Fundamentalism that spent a significant amount of class time on Fundamentalism in the Middle East (both Jewish and Islamic Fundamentalism were covered, and I wrote a thirty-page research paper on changes in violence between the First and Second Sudanese Civil War due in relation to Islamic Fundamentalism.)  As I struggled to piece together a schedule that fit both my major requirements and my interests, I spoke to my academic advisor.  I explained that I was surprised at the lack of a Middle Eastern Studies department at the undergraduate level given the excellence at the graduate level, and asked if I could possibly take graduate courses at SAIS to make up for the lack of courses offered in the subject area at Homewood.  She reminded me that I was required to take a certain number of credits at the Homewood campus and that traveling back and forth to D.C. for classes would be expensive and time-consuming.  She looked through the course catalogues for previous years and we discovered that there wouldn’t be enough classes focusing on the region for me to take for more than a semester or two more.  The nearest Persian class was either a 45 minute train ride away at SAIS or an hour’s bus ride to a partner school.  I was on track to run out of Arabic classes before graduation due to my acceptance into the Critical Language Scholarship program this summer.

Spring Fair at Hopkins

“What GPA did you get your first semester?” she asked.  I told her.  ”I think you might want to try for transfer.”

“I can’t get in,” I said automatically.  ”There’s no way they’ll take me after only a year of college if they didn’t like what they saw senior year.”  My mind was already in a state of panic as I tried to remember what the Common Application even looked like.  ”They already said no.  I don’t think you understand how much I don’t want more rejection emails.”

“If you don’t at least try for transfer, you’ll always wonder what would have happened if you had tried.”

“There is no way they’re going to take me.”

“Only one way to find out.  You’re from Vegas, aren’t you?  Are you telling me that you’re afraid to gamble $50 on the education you want?”

Statue at Columbia

I went through my own little 5 Stages of Grief after that meeting, first refusing to believe that anyone would be silly enough to suggest that I transfer, then becoming angry at the thought of using money I’d saved from my job to pay for another round of applications, then bargaining with myself by coming up with wildly impractical plans that wouldn’t involve needing to transfer, (“I can just study abroad like all of junior year and hope I have the classes I want senior year and sophomore spring semester!” “I can try to apply for a Wilson Fellowship even if there’s no professor doing research in the area I want to study!”) then sadness, and finally acceptance where I compared the programs I was thinking of transferring into with those offered at Hopkins and realized that I was going to have to do this if I wanted to study what I’d become interested in before graduate school

I cautiously sent emails out to some of my instructors from my fall semester, asking if they’d be willing to write me the required letters of recommendation.  In less than 12 hours my writing teacher from my Debates in International Relations class emailed me, saying that he’d be happy to write the letter and asking where I was thinking of applying.  I emailed him the list of tentitive schools, and he offered to discuss the pros and cons of each school over the phone with me if I wanted any information from what he’d experienced in graduate school and in the workforce.  My list, already small due to my need for a lot of aid and the fact that many schools will not give aid to transfers, shrunk even more from his advice.  I wrote my essays, journeyed back to the wonderful and terrible place known as the Common Application, and finished the application process just before the workload in my classes picked up.  If I was to point to one major difference between my senior year application process and my transfer application process, it would be that there was definitely a lot less pressure this time around.  If I wasn’t accepted anywhere outside of Nevada as a senior it would have killed my entire career path, but this time around I knew that Hopkins was an excellent school and that if I had to stay I could always study general international relations during undergrad and specialize in grad school.  The stakes were nowhere near as high.  Throughout this entire semester there has always been the voice in the back of my head going, “You could stay here and be reasonably happy.  You don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.”

My freshman dorm, AMR I

When the acceptance emails came in I turned to the people I’ve been indebted to since arriving at Homewood in August: my friends and mentors at Hopkins.  I had long talks with a lot of people about the choices that I had suddenly been presented with, and the result of these talks was at once unanimous and supportive: Columbia would be able to offer me more in my particular subject area, and they would be happy with my choice even if it took me away from Hopkins and themselves.

“How can you turn this down?” someone said.  ”What are you going to do with yourself for another three years at Hopkins if you’re running out of programs already?  You need to go.”

I came to the decision that if I could have friends across the country and even across the world that I keep in touch with, I could still keep in contact with my friends at Hopkins, but I could not take classes at Columbia remotely and I couldn’t transport New York City to Baltimore.  I could wait to specialize in graduate school, or I could use the next three years as productively as possible.  I could turn back, or I could keep going forward.

More snow at Columbia (it was January.)

In the ultimate twist of fate, I have now ended up attending two universities that I never imagined I’d go to.  Hopkins, as I touched on in my first blog, was a school I applied to at the very last minute at the urging of a friend.  Columbia was pulled off the list of colleges I was applying to because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to live in as big as city as New York.  I’d visited campus the summer of my senior year and wasn’t blown away, but when the Hopkins Mock Trial team traveled to New York City for a tournament during Intersession I stayed with a friend and loved the people and the campus.  The same friend, interestingly enough, was exactly the fourth friend I ever made in high school, moved out of the country at the beginning of my junior year, and is now my unofficial personal tour guide/advisor for living at Columbia.  Life is funny.

After all this, why am I still writing for this blog if I’m not going to be a Hopkins student in the fall?  When I accepted Columbia’s offer I decided that I still wanted to blog throughout this summer and share my adventures in Oman because I was only accepted to that program with the help of my professors and advisors at Hopkins.  I applied as a Hopkins student with a Hopkins transcript with letters of recommendation from Hopkins faculty, and if there has been one message to pick out in this jumbled emotional mess of a blog I hope that it has to do with how instrumental Hopkins has been in getting me where I am now.  I’m going to be very candid: freshman year admissions left me with the choice of Johns Hopkins, a small liberal arts school on the East Coast with no international relations programs and $60,000 a year in loans, or a state school without international relations or Arabic.  Everyone — from the admissions officer who admitted me, to the advisor who suggested that Hopkins would not have the programs for me, to the instructor who offered to give me advice on where to apply, to the SAABers that let me write a blog that’s gone on the application for every program I’ve been accepted to this year — has been a key part of my success.  I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the people of Hopkins.  This school and its people have given me so much this year, and I think the least I can do in return is blog in Oman.

SAAB

 

Leaving the Nest

Posted by | Posted on May 6, 2012
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“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.’”

J.R.R. Tolkien

My friends Catherine and Joe in Jordan. The three of us we were known as the "Three Musketeers"

I can only start my final freshman blog by looking back at my first blog post, written a year ago, “Midway on Our Life’s Journey”.  In it I compared my college application process to Dante’s Inferno, revealed that I had no idea what I was going to do in college, and made a lot of jokes about going to a Catholic high school.  The blog ended like this:

“No matter what I decide to do, I will forever be one of the lucky ones. I will make the absolute most of what I’ve just been handed: a four-year golden ticket to wherever I chose. I’m not stuck in Limbo anymore. I know where I’m headed next.”

When I wrote that blog, I had no idea how weird my friends would be.

When I wrote that I had no idea what this year would be like.  I had no idea that I’d make so many new friends in every team and extracurricular I joined.  I had no idea that I’d ride down rapids.  I had no idea that I’d be writing a blog trying to explain what my freshman year was like as I finished up three final essays and projects, packed my things into storage, and shopped online for clothing appropriate for a summer in Salalah, Oman and a fall in Washington, D.C..

I suppose one could make the argument that this time last year I didn’t know where I was going, and that in writing the blog I was simply being an optimistic little 18 year old who had, truthfully, no idea what she was getting herself into.  I only found out I was selected as a State Department Critical Language Scholar and going to Oman this summer in mid-March, and only found out in mid-April that I received an Aitchison Public Service Fellowship in Government and was going to be living/interning in D.C. this fall instead of staying on the Homewood Campus.  One can further argue that I don’t know where I’m studying abroad in the coming semesters, that I don’t know if I’ll try to apply to the 5 year BA/MA program with SAIS, that I don’t know where I’ll be after graduation or even after lunch today.

The Class of 2015 bloggers at the beginning of the year.

Knowing where one will be in the physical sense is admittedly tricky.  Especially at Hopkins, there are so many paths to take and so many places to explore that I’m quite certain you can go wherever you want.  The bloggers at Hopkins Interactive will be spread all over this world this summer.  JHU_Tess is going to be in London, JHU_Kate in France, JHU_Lauren in Africa, JHU_Ian in Italy, JHU_Erica, JHU_Allysa, and JHU_Cate in California.  I have little doubt that when we all arrived at this school we never imagined where we would be physically this summer, but I think we all knew mentally where we were heading next and knew that by coming to Hopkins we were already there.  We knew that by going to this school we were going to be mentally ready for anything that came our way.  We knew that no matter where we ended up, we were going to try our damnest to be successful.  We knew that wherever we went, we’d be able to take our experiences at Hopkins and know that regardless of how often our physical location changed, we’d always be able to say, “Mentally, I’m already where I want to be.”

Watching "A Very Potter Musical" during Intersession.

The thought of leaving the security of the Homewood Campus for Washington, D.C. so early has definitely made these last few weeks of classes much more poignant.  This is not just the last Arabic class of my freshman year, it is the last time I will sit in a Homewood classroom for at least ten months.  The night of watching Rome with my friends wasn’t just the last time we’ll hang out freshman year, but the last time I’ll live in the same building with them for at least ten months, maybe even until our junior year.  By the time I’ll come back to campus, the Brody Learning Center will be done, my friends and I will have to look at apartments, and I’ll officially have to declare my major.

So, to all the people along the way that made this year what it was – my friends at Hopkins and from back home, my professors who asked me what a girl from Las Vegas was doing on the East Coast, my teammates and coworkers who didn’t let me quit, my family who went months without seeing me, a certain mayor of NYC who gave me the scholarship that allowed me to come here in the first place, the team of SAABers who picked me to share my stories – thank you.

I guess I’ve almost survived my freshman year of college.  There’s still quite a bit of moving around to do in my future.  I stepped into the Road last August by coming to Hopkins, and there is no telling where I’ll be swept off into.   Going out your door, going across the country for college, and going across the world for a summer are all dangerous businesses because there’s a chance the adventure might not go as planned.  Maybe you don’t go to your first-choice college.  Maybe you get homesick because you haven’t seen your family in four months.  Maybe you don’t speak the language or know the culture.  Maybe you don’t know where the Road is taking you.

But maybe that’s what makes it interesting.  Maybe all the pressure and all the work and all the nights you spend wondering what the heck is going to happen next make you mentally strong to the point where no matter where you are, you’re always exactly where you’ve always wanted to be: ready for a challenge.

 “At dusk the three of us encountered an elderly lady and her beagle hiking toward us. Teetering along on a walking stick, she wore a motoring cap and held a bunch of wildflowers. I said hello and asked her where she was going. She replied in Welsh, ‘Rydw i yna yn barod.’ We looked to Erica for a translation. ‘She said, “I’m already there.”’”

-“A Ramble in Wales,” from National Geographic Traveler

A Year in Gifs

Posted by | Posted on May 1, 2012
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It’s the last week of classes for my freshman year of college so I’ve been feeling a lot like this lately:

This semester’s been an emotional roller coaster to say the least, and when all is said and done this week I’ll still have a massive research paper due on the fifteenth.  I started to write about this past year, really write about it, but then I couldn’t do it.  Not yet.  I can’t properly look back on the semester until it’s finally over,  that last paper is gone, and I’m headed back to spend a few days with my family before hopping on a plane again.

So, like any good teenager, I filled the time when I should have been writing my really deep, thought-provoking blog by mindlessly surfing the internet for gifs to describe my year.

When I found out I got into Hopkins

When everyone thought I was pre-med

When my friends and I were really bored the rest of the summer

When I climbed 40 feet on a rock wall, baked a cake without an oven, and rode down a rapid on Pre-Orientation

When I moved in and my roommate gave me cookies

When everyone in my dorm went to the Blue Jay Ball

When my laptop broke the first day of classes

When I got a job as a videographer

When I discovered the glory that is the FFC

When I was accepted into SAAB

When my friends and I had to figure out how to do laundry

When Adam Riess won the Nobel Prize

When my partner and I won a novice debate tournament on a case about economics

When stayed at my friend’s house for Thanksgiving and ate a lot

When I went back to Vegas and finally got my license on the 4th attempt

When I saw my friends again during Intersession

When the debate team went to Dartmouth in January 

When the mock trial team went to NYC

When covered grades were over

When I found out I was going to Oman

When everything was due the week before Spring Break


When it was Spring Fair

When Loyola thought they were going to beat us

When my friends and I found out we were living together next year

When I think about how I felt freshman year

What Are We Busy About? The Classes Blog

Posted by | Posted on April 24, 2012
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“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
--Henry David Thoreau

 

As I frantically try to finish my last major paper of the semester other than my research paper, it’s finally hit me that I have two weeks of classes left in my freshman year of college.  All my finals are either in the form of essays or final presentations, so I could hypothetically fly home the weekend of May 3rd and finish my research paper at home.  I decided to stay a bit longer, though, for reasons that will be discussed in-depth in my next blog.  I’m hoping to be more productive in writing my paper here than at home, perhaps finish up some video projects, and maybe relax a bit before heading home for a week or so break before flying back to DC to meet with all the other participants in my summer program in Oman.  Things are happening very fast and at times it’s been absolutely insane to think of what I’ve done this past year, but that, again, is for my next blog.

I will also reveal why the videographers put a camera on a tripod on a table during Spring Fair.

 

During SOHOP I had the chance to meet with a lot of perspective students and their parents, and a question I was asked numerous times was what classes freshman take at Hopkins.  Since we don’t have either a core curriculum or a department containing the vast majority of students, this is a question that’s impossible to answer except on an individual basis.

 

First-Year Arabic

This class is a continuation of the class I had last semester, so for an in-depth description you can check out my classes blog for last semester.  Arabic is definitely getting harder as we go along and get away from simplistic vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, but my perceptions about this class have changed rapidly since I found out that I’ll have to speak nothing but this language for two months this summer.  In the meantime, I’m taking advantage of the language lab to practice and talking with past students from Hopkins who have traveled to Oman.  Here’s the obligatory dubbed Disney song in Arabic!

American animated movie about Greek mythology dubbed in Arabic.  It almost beats the American animated movie about a Chinese legend from my older blog….

Beginning Farsi I

I was a little hesitant about taking two languages concurrently, especially two languages written in a totally different alphabet than English and Spanish, but this class has been an absolute blast,  The twelve or so people in my class (including JHU_Kevin) all talk a lot and we get to carry on conversations in Farsi, eat Perisan sweets, and watch Persian movies.  Our professor is really sweet and always willing to stop class to answer questions about the language.  Coming in knowing the Arabic alphabet was a big help in the beginning of the class, but now at the end of the semester people are pretty much on an even playing field.  It’s also interesting to see Arabic loanwords in Farsi and vice-versa, like when you see Spanish influences on English.  Here’s a video showing one of my favorite movies, The Emperor’s New Groove, dubbed over in Farsi.

Freshman Seminar: US-USSR Cold War

I wanted to take full advantage of the Freshman Seminars offered at Hopkins, so this is my second and last one.  When I first signed up for the class I thought it was going to be a basic class about the history or politics of the Cold War, but this class has been very interesting in that we’re much more focused on the cultural aspects of the Cold War, like movies, books, newspaper articles, etc.  We’ve watched spy movies like From Russia with Love and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we’ve read books examining the role of Holywood in American pop culture, and we’ve listened to Russian protest songs.  The class has been totally unexpected, but it’s been fascinating seeing the Cold War in this light.  Everyone in the class can also pretend to be super hipster by saying things like, “Well I find the American remake of Solaris to be severely lacking.”   Here’s a clip from the 1979 BBC miniseries based of John Le Carre’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. 

Zionism, post-Zionism, and Modern Hebrew Literature

I signed up for this class because one of my friends took a class with the same professor in the fall and absolutely loved it.  This class has been very useful in giving me a different perspective on Middle Eastern politics as seen through various works of Hebrew literature.  I’ve always had a soft spot for Hebrew poetry since having to give a presentation on Yehuda Amachai my sophomore year of high school, and we’ve been able to look at politics through some great works (including a vampire story!)  This class also has an abundance of guest lecturers coming to speak to our class, which has been a great experience because it’s allowed me to hear a lot of interesting lectures on modern Israel.  Some of the guest lecturers have come in to talk about the politics of creating the modern Hebrew language and the shifting meaning of the binding of Isaac in Israeli politics.

Comparative Sociology of Religious Fundamentalism

This is hands-down the absolute hardest class I’ve taken in my life, and it’s also been the class I’ve learned the most in.  I’m the only freshman in this upper-level class, and one of the few non-Sociology majors.  The class can be daunting at times: our professor assigns hundres of pages of reading a week and encourages us to look at even more perspectives outside the required reading, and I have a 25 page research paper due at the end of the semester.  Even if the amount of work is scary at times, I’ve learned so much about various fundamentalist movements around the world.  Although some fundamentalist groups, like Al-Qaeda, are very well known, there have been so many others we’ve studied over the semester by having a new “case study” every week.  So far we’ve studied  Israeli fundamentalist groups, Indian fundamentalists, the Pakistani Jamiat-i-Islami, the Muslim Brotherhood, American Protestant fundamentalists, and so many others.  I’ve been able to do extensive research for a research paper in the class, and 7,000 pages of reading later (I counted) I finally settled on writing a paper on the influence of Pan-Arab Movements on the Second Sudanese Civil War.

The semester  has gone by so fast.  It’s definitely felt more overwhelming than my first semester, but I mean overwhelming in the best possible sense of the word.  I’ve had to many amazing opportunities this semester and have lined up incredible opportunities in the future, and as my freshman year winds down I’ve begun to realize that several goals I had in mind when I came to college have already been achieved, while I’ve added goals that I never even knew existed before this year.

Viva Las Misconceptions

Posted by | Posted on April 7, 2012
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“I’ve been writing this story for about two years now, and this is my first trip to Las Vegas,” the author explained, as our English teacher passed out thick packets of paper to each of us.  “I was so shocked at the stuff you guys had here!  Your school has a church in it!”

“It’s a Catholic school.”  Everyone smirked.

“It was just so weird, seeing a church in Las Vegas!”  The author smiled.  “Now kids, I want you to read the story so I know I’m on the right track.  It’s about a kid just like you from Las Vegas whose dad is an Elvis impersonator and who goes to school on the Strip!  I want you to tell me if what I think Vegas is all about is true, and don’t go easy on me!”

With dread filling our little high school freshman hearts, my classmates and I began to read.

 

Going to a Catholic school in Las Vegas is like being Italian and using pasta sauce from a jar in that it’s weird and sooner or later someone’s going to ask you about it.  Even taking out the confusion about churches existing in a place called Sin City, growing up in Las Vegas is going to get you some weird questions from outsiders.  I had people literally freak out the first few weeks of school when I introduced myself to them, with reactions ranging from “Do you even own a coat?” to “I bet you party ALL THE TIME!”

“Stereotypes, man,” sighed my best friend from her dorm room in California via Skype.  ”Only Vegas people get Vegas.”

When I went home over winter break I noticed something odd happening when people would ask me where I went to school.  Going to Johns Hopkins is is like being Italian and using pasta sauce from a jar in that very few people do so (the last few years have only let in about four kids a year.)  People back home literally freak out when they find out where I’m going to college, with reactions ranging from “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” to “Don’t you feel unsafe in Baltimore?”

“Hopkins just has this reputation,” sighed my roommate (or, rather, she texted me and I read it in my head as a sigh.)  ”I feel like you have to come here to understand it.”

Then it hit me: Johns Hopkins and Las Vegas both suffer from some massive image problems because the stereotyped image of both places is all most people have in their heads when they hear their names.  If that author my freshman year of high school had decided to write a book about Johns Hopkins without visiting it first, it may have been about a kid just like me who went to Hopkins as a pre-med BME/ChemBE double major and had no life because she spends all her time in the library hiding out from both the roving bands of violent criminals hanging out outside the library doors and from the cutthroat kids inside the library who kept stealing her notes before a test.  And this book, like her book about Vegas, would make everyone furious because those stereotypes are not what these places are in the slightest.  

 

Career Field Stereotypes

 

In Vegas Everyone Works in a Casino and At Hopkins Everyone is Pre-Med 

They didn't have an Elvis costume small enough for me, so I was unable to staff this stand of Hangover merchandise. This failure will haunt me throughout my life.

Vegas truth: Okay, my best friend’s parents are blackjack dealers and my dad provides food to most of the restaurants in the casinos.  I’m not going to argue that no one works in a casino, but there are plenty of other career paths you can take in Vegas.  My friends’ parents have the usual assortment of doctors, teachers, lawyers, television weathermen, and government workers that every other city needs to function. One of my classmates had parents who worked for -get ready for it – the water authority.   Hardcore, right? Clearly The Hangover was an accurate portrayal of my hometown.

Hopkins truth: There are pre-meds (in fact I’m living with three of them next year), but the school is more balanced than people seem to think it is.  International Studies is our largest major on campus, we have a pretty even split between natural science majors, engineering majors, and socials science/humanities majors.  Even if you want to argue that there are a lot of pre-meds, one of the great things about Hopkins is that you can be pre-med and major in anything you want as long as you complete a few pre-med required classes, so I know political science major pre-meds, writing seminars pre-meds, and English pre-meds.  The students here are certainly not one-trick ponies.

Lifestyle Stereotypes

 

In Vegas Everyone Parties All the Time and At  Hopkins Everyone Studies All the Time and Is Mean

Vegas Truth

My friends and I going wild on New Years Eve...by playing Super Smash Brothers.

If you’re from New York, do you visit the Empire State Building all the time?  If you’re from D.C., do you go to the Library of Congress all the time?  If you’re from California, do you go to the beach all the time?  I suppose there is a small portion of Las Vegans (pronounced veh-GAHNS, not VEE-gahns like that diet where you’re nicer to animals than I can ever hope to be) who party it up nightly, but the majority of us are worried about other things (paying mortgagees, keeping jobs, keeping our grades up) that almost make us seem, you know, normal.   If you are a Vegas kid, you are forever considered the “party kid”, even if your craziest moment was not properly ejecting a flash drive from your computer, because when people think “Las Vegas” they think of The Hangover and New Years Eve and bachelor parties and all the insanity that go with them, but most people going crazy in Vegas are not the locals.

Hopkins Truth

No one’s going to look at a resume and go, “Hopkins?  What a joke school!”  People get that Hopkins is challenging and that’s why we have such a good reputation.  Like the small portion of Las Vegans who party it up every night, there is a portion of kids at Hopkins that will live in the library, but the majority of us are doing other things because we realize that a GPA is only one part of what college is about.  Kids here are some of the most active extracurricular participants that I know, doing stuff like hosting a Model UN conference for 1,600 high school students or participating in the performing arts, because they’ve realized that students cannot live on classwork alone.

Persian candy being modeled by our resident beauty JHU_Kevin.

There’s an entire community here filled with kids that do amazing things outside the classroom.  About 25% of students are a part of Greek Life, so there are definitely parties here, (that are also open to non-Greek students) and most clubs or teams will have their own get-togethers.  As for meanness, I’ve seen time and time again more collaboration here than I did at my high school.  Everyone realizes that you’re not going to get any better grade by hurting the person next to you in class, and it’s much more productive to work together so you both succeed.  Professors, too, care a lot about their students.  My Persian teacher brought us Iranian cookies and deserts for class one day because he thought we were doing such a good job!

City Stereotypes

 

 Las Vegans Live in Casinos and Hopkins Students Live in a Slum

Vegas Truth

The road leading to my house. Note the lack of both casinos and Elvis Impersonators.

I live about 15 minutes from the Strip and five minutes from a casino, (fun Vegas tidbit: even though most casinos are in a certain area, there are also casinos spread throughout the Valley) but you wouldn’t know it from the quiet suburban neighborhood.  I pay more attention to the gorgeous mountains you can see from my window than the casinos, and the only time I realize how close I am is on New Years Eve and the Fourth of July when all the hotels and casinos have massive fireworks shows that I get to watch from my friend’s balcony.  Vegas is largely suburban outside the very touristy Strip, but we also have gorgeous desert and mountains surrounding us with a ton of parks to go hiking in (one of these parks also contains Mojave Max, a desert tortoise who performs a similar function to Punxsutawney Phil in that he comes out of his home to tell us if winter is over.)  We also the largest man-made lake in the Western Hemisphere, Lake Mead, that was created when the Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression.  A ton of people take their boats out on weekends.  A lot of people barely even go to the Strip because there’s so much other stuff to do.

Hopkins Truth

JHU_Joseph, JHU_Erica, and JHU_Ian are lying on the ground, victims of...laughter.

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me I was going to get shot in Baltimore, I would be richer than Hopkins alum Michael Bloomberg.  A big reason for this stereotype of Baltimore being a dangerous city comes from the fact that The Wire was such a successful show that focused on the seedier aspects of Baltimore (in the way that CSI: Las Vegas gives people a picture of Vegas that focuses on its seedier aspects.)  I’m not going to suggest that you walk around ten blocks off campus talking loudly on your iPhone and carrying your MacBook, but this advice applies to every college that isn’t in a rural area.  Baltimore is a city, and like every city there are nice areas and not so nice areas, but the area around Hopkins is extremely safe.  We have a ton of security (led by a former Secret Service agent) keeping an eye on the students, and in my first year I’ve never had a time where I felt unsafe (or perhaps the criminals were scared off by my imposing 5 foot nothing frame.)  Greater Baltimore also has a ton of things to do, and I thank my involvement as a videographer for Learn More, See More, B’More for allowing me to see a lot of Baltimore as a freshman.

Weather Stereotypes

It’s Always Hot in Vegas and It’s Always Miserably Cold in Baltimore 

 Vegas Truth

This happened.

It’s not always hot.  I wore jeans, boots, and a turtleneck sweater to take an AP exam last year-in May.  The arid climate (humidity is still a strange concept to me) means it can go from pleasantly warm to freezing with winds up to 40 mph in a few hours. It also gets very cold here in the winter, and the greatest thing is that any snowfall at all results in an automatic snow day because no one owns snow shovels in a desert!  Shaking snow off a palm tree is something I was able to cross off my bucket list last year.  When it’s hot, I won’t lie, it is hot, (after going up to Dartmouth in -14 degree weather for a debate tournament in January I was able to brag that I had experienced 134 degrees of temperature fluctuation throughout my life) but, as the locals say, it’s a dry heat.

Hopkins Truth

Hopkins covered by....invisible snow I guess? I was told there would be snow and was lied to.

It’s been warmer here than in Las Vegas for a significant number of days.  My parents were taking cover from hail back home when I was walking around in a tank top and skirt this February.  I think it’s legitimately snowed once in Baltimore this year, which is a far cry from the weather I was expecting when I lugged a parka and a brand-new pair of snow boots to Hopkins in August.  A lot of kids I know, and this applies mainly to West-Coasters, worry that the weather on the East Coast will be terrible, but this year has been a lot better than I thought.

 

Reading the story of an Elvis impersonator’s son taught me a valuable lesson about stereotypes: they doggedly exist, no matter how hard you try to kill them and no matter how false they may be.  Little did I know back then that I would eventually be going to a school full of stereotypes like everyone going to medical school, stealing each other’s notes from the library, and generally being filled with misery.  Like the stereotypes of my own home town, I’ve found these all to be totally exaggerated or just flat out wrong, but the only way you’re going to find out for yourself is if you come out to visit.  You’ll have to plan your Vegas trip yourself, but for admitted students SOHOP is right around the corner and a great way to see for yourself what Hopkins is all about!

 

 

 

Featured image is not my picture (it belongs to Wikipedia user Lasvegaslover) and can be found at this page.