Exploring Two Worlds
Ute Wenkemann NU’11 and Jim Stellar
What happens when a student from Germany comes to an American university that features a cooperative education program? Both are cultural adjustments, first from the home country and then from the home university. Ute did just that. We met over an administrative matter when she was a freshman and I was the Dean at Northeastern. Now a few years later, after a long period of contact, we look at the contrast between these experiences as potentially instructive to how education might work better. First, I asked Ute to write about the emotional logic (i.e. other lobe) aspects of making her first adjustment to the USA.
Coming to the U.S. was definitely not an easy decision for me. Still, I found myself adjusting really fast to the college culture. Since I switched out of the German school system when I was 15 to continue my education at an international school, I don’t know much about college/university in my home country. But I do know that interacting with professors on a personal level is a rare occurrence there. University in Germany is much more self-lead; it is more of a personal study than a school and it is therefore easy to fall behind, whereas I feel that, at an American University, one has to try hard to fail. The professors are mostly very on track and really helpful. Also, the small class sizes allow for more personal relationships between students and professors – it is less anonymous. I considered all of these aspects when making my decision to come to the US and although I knew I was going to miss Germany a lot, I decided to take the risk of getting homesick once in a while. And I do believe that the experience I’m having is definitely worth it. I t had no problem getting used to the class routine. A lot harder was dealing with the new living situation. I know now that I am not made for sharing a room with someone, but even in a single room living on campus was tough for me. When you are always on campus, you don’t really get to come home after class. I didn’t like that and I have been much happier since moving off campus. I’ve also stopped comparing everything here to Germany because things just aren’t comparable. Once I stopped comparing, things became a lot easier.
Now let’s take this kind of adjustment and compare it to working on a cooperative education term in the well-known Northeastern program. How is that for you?
I absolutely loved my first coop. Fortunately, my work had little to do with a normal interning position – I really felt like I was part of the team. I believe that the company I worked for does a great job motivating their employees. Almost everybody I worked with seemed enthusiastic and most of my co-workers enjoyed the work. I did, too, and although I was living on campus for the first half of my coop, I wasn’t involved with campus life at all. I also hadn’t chosen a job from the NU database, so there were no other Northeastern students working with me at my workplace. All of that resulted in me feeling like a young working professional rather than a college student. I am very happy to have taken advantage of NU’s coop program; however, I do feel that it depends on the individual student more so than on the university whether or not a coop is successful. I was ready to work and I wouldn’t have minded to stay/never go back to school. But I know from friends that they much prefer class over coop. And I must say that, although I loved working, I also enjoy class a lot. Still, I’m ready to go on coop again in the spring and I’m hoping my next one will be just as successful as the first.
I want to pick up on your “feeling part of the team” comment. That is typical of an immersion experience which leads to great focus and learning. It can happen in a classroom where one gets enthralled with a teacher’s presentation and loses track of time. How do you feel that your immersion in the work experience has been influenced by your heritage growing up in Germany?
Hm that’s a tough question. To be honest, I’m not sure if there is any connection between the two things at all. I believe a big part of why I was able to do the job I did (and feel part of the team) was that I was not considered a typical college student at my company. My superiors and co-workers kept telling me how surprised they were about my considerably young age compared to my level of professionalism. It could be that this level of professionalism (or maturity?) is tied to me leaving my home country at age 19, which obviously required a certain amount of independence and the ability to grow up a little faster – because I really didn’t have anybody around anymore to take care of me. Overall though, I feel that every hard worker could have achieved the same degree of “belonging” at my company. It was just a great place to be and it would have been just as great for any American student.
One of the “otherlobe” aspects of experiential learning is stepping out of one’s comfort zone and then perhaps re-establishing to facilitate that immersion we characterized as “feeling part of the team.” So much of what we seem to do automatically as people involves setting up contexts and expectations. But moving between cultures is invaluable to having that dual perspective on a problem. In another post, that issue was discussed. Here we would focus more on the duality of the perspective as being useful to learning. Note that a physical object, like a glass, is easily identified as a cylinder even thought it could look like a circle if viewed only from the top. By being in two countries, we believe that this dual perspective is constantly activated and makes for a richer understanding of activities in each, such as communications, marketing, management, etc.
One thing that often characterizes change is the inability to change back once it has happened. It’s the same here: Every experience, be it moving to a new country or starting a new job, adds to our overall knowledge of the world and the more knowledge we accumulate, the more impossible it becomes to disregard the things we have learned. A child that knows nothing about math will easily believe that 2+2 = 5, but as soon as it learns that 2+2 is 4 in the context of a math class where that equation is embedded in a whole system of logic, the child is unlikely to ever be able to believe that 2+2 = 5 again. In a way, that is also a sad truth since sometimes, it is easier to see things the one-dimensional way. However, in a world where multi-dimensional information is just a couple of mouse clicks away, we probably can’t afford to close our eyes from the many dimensions there are. Being comfortable in a global environment (whether in the real world or on-line), knowing what is “truth” as in the algebra example above may well be due to a gain in otherlobe knowledge outside learning of the straight forward facts and theories. Good programs in higher education pay attention to both.
