Orientation week has been packed with meeting lots of new people, learning about facilities, activities and programs at the school, and climbing (very many) stairs to get to and from my “house”. Here are some pictures of the campus and the beautiful sunny weather we’ve been having (my German co-years told me Freiburg is Germany’s sunniest city!):
our dorms, organized into “houses” 
left: the Kartause (school building)
right: the Waschhaus (bike workshop)
the “Village Square” displaying distances to the other UWC campuses 
the front of the Kartause
Over the past week, I’ve met with my roomies, housemates, house tutor (adult who organizes house meetings, helps us organize living together, and generally serves as a parent at home), and personal tutor (adult who also serves as kind of parent, but more on the academic side of things). In groups, we’ve met with the school counsellor, attended intercultural workshops, been introduced to over 30 project week proposals (more on that later), taken placement tests for English and Math (which made me realize how lucky I am to have English as a mother tongue), chosen our courses and partied… and it’s been exhilarating and exhausting.
We are also beginning to choose college jobs, CAS activities, and project weeks – our timetables will be full in four short days!
- College jobs are positions you can take on to help out in the community; jobs include being a library assistant, an IT assistant, a First Responder (becoming trained in advanced first aid), or helping organize our free secondhand store, the Chic Boutique.
- CAS stands for Creativity, Activity, and Service, and makes up a large part of the extracurricular activities that students participate in after classes and on the weekends. Over the next few weeks, we get the opportunity to try out some activities we might be interested in before we commit to our CAS activities for the semester.
- Over the past two days, we received an introduction to Project Week, a week where staff and students pause classes once a semester (twice a year) to pursue a project that may be outdoor (eg. camping and hiking or biking), regional (within 150 km of the campus), service (eg. helping to build fences for a summer camp, serving at a non-profit that assists refugees), and/or achieving a specific goal (eg. a piece of theater, an exhibition of photography). This is one of the opportunities we have to travel, from as close as the Black Forest to as far as Denmark, Italy or Croatia. We listened to 3-minute pitches from the second years’ proposals and submitted our first choice project week yesterday. Hopefully, I can go canoeing and climbing in southern France at the beginning of October, but I will know within a few days!
Yesterday we had our “bike test” where we took the school bikes for a short ride into the city to assess our basic biking skills and knowledge of hand signals and the road. Fortunately, I passed, so now I can borrow a bike to explore Freiburg and go shopping!
Classes begin on Tuesday, and for the first time in a long time, I can’t wait to begin school!
Until next time!
all that jazz 