Hello again! In my last post I mentioned I intended to write 8 more blog posts to fill in the gap after mid-November, but seeing as I haven’t written since then, I think I’ll revise my goal into 2 more posts: one on Nov to March and one on March to June.

In the end, my trip home actually went almost as planned when we bought the tickets in December. I left school as intended on Tuesday, June 9 and arrived at home in the night on the same day. I’m really grateful I was able to make it home, and I hope the students remaining on campus are also able to go home for some part of the summer if possible.

UWC Robert Bosch College was the only UWC of 18 colleges that was open for the last few months, and the only UWC that returned to classes. We reopened on May 4, welcoming back staff who live off campus and implementing new rules to maintain social distancing during the school day. We proceeded with end of year exams for first years a week later as well as IA data gathering and TOK presentations in the last two weeks of classes.

We finished classes on Tues, June 2 and TOK presentations on Thurs, June 4, then had our “disorientation” from Friday to Sunday and a thorough house and room cleaning on Monday.

I was a bit nervous to travel, but everything went quite smoothly and the airports and planes were definitely less busy than usual. For the summer, I plan to finish as much schoolwork as I reasonably can, including a draft of my Extended Essay and my Chemistry and Biology internal assessments. I can see myself losing motivation if I don’t also do other things, so I hope I’ll be able to vary my days with hobbies like baking, playing piano, and biking and playing badminton outdoors as well as spending time with my family. Another two of my major interests this summer are studying neuroscience and volunteering with research on the treatment of aphasia (difficulty with language caused by brain damage (e.g., stroke, head trauma, Alzheimer’s)). I am currently taking Medical Neuroscience on Coursera from Duke University, and I am enjoying it, but the workload is quite intense. I am not sure I will be able to finish on time because I want to make sure my notes are thorough…

Hopefully those two posts come through and I’ll provide an update on my summer plans!

Bis bald (see you soon)!