Geneva, Switzerland
21 Oct 2018
I know many GW students still have midterms going on right now… but this week we have our final exams! So soon, right? Yet here I am sitting in one of the few places open on Sunday in Switzerland, relaxing and doing a bit of work for this week. Something special about SIT is the way our directors design the academic schedule for this specific program. The framework of our semester includes 2 months of classroom time and excursions. The latter half of our time here includes a designated research period and a few french lessons.
Sipping tea and writing my Local Case Study paper in Geneva. Not much is open on Sundays here!
As a senior, I have become well-accustomed to studying and taking tests at GW and, to some extent, I find them to be predictable based on the types of questions I have been asked in the past (this is department-specific, of course). Because we only have midterms and finals here in Switzerland, adjusting to this style of testing has been a large portion of the acclimation to life abroad. However, we students quickly learned that these exams and the professors who created them do not intend to trick us or foster self-doubt.
I think I mentioned this briefly in an earlier post but our mentors here also encourage us to learn, process, and apply the concepts we’ve learned to real-world circumstances particularly as they pertain to extremely vulnerable communities in conflict zones or areas affected by natural disaster and/or political turmoil. Additionally, every time we have a guest lecturer or visit a pre-eminent organization there is, quite predictably, a discussion about career and personal development in the field of global health and how each expert has taken a different route to work in this highly integrated discipline. Thus, the way our exams are designed allows us to integrate our notes and assemble a narrative about such integration and why this approach allows humanitarian aid and development policy to be as complex as it is. I also believe that it would be unjustified for our professors to expect us to regurgitate this high-volume of information and still experience the Swiss lifestyle, void of anxious energy particularly in the classroom setting. I have thoroughly benefitted from this style of teaching/ learning and wish the American college education that we're exposed to resembled this. It took me some time to understand that these assessments (papers included) are not intended to deplete students of energy; they are meant to be informative, engaging, enjoyable and most of all enriching.
International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Our lecture here pertained to Child Labor and the role of global governance in addressing hazardous and inhumane working conditions for children.
United Nations event entitled “Where will we go?” about the implications of climate change on humanitarian aid. UN Office in Geneva, Switzerland.
Me at the Doctor’s Without Borders office in Geneva, Switzerland. As an aspiring physician, I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to have our lecture at MSF.
Taken outside of our lecture hall at the UN Environmental Program office in Geneva, Switzerland