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Resident Director Updates
Last month a group of students accompanied Alex Nemchonok to Pskov where he and his ultimate frisbee team from St. Pete went on to take 3rd place out of 12 teams in a regional tournament.
Meanwhile, Julianna Bores gave a presentation for UNESCO on a report she compiled from a published work on the state of education in Russia and several of the former Soviet Republics. Her thirty-minute presentation to a group of UNESCO and university representatives constituted the culmination of several months of preparation, including the compilation of the report from a general UNESCO report in English, the translation of the report into Russian, and the presentation. Her work may be published by the university and has already been noted online.
In other news, with the help of the assistant resident director, Alec Luhn, a journalism major, secured an internship at the St. Petersburg Times, for which he's now written several special reports on exhibits around the city, including one on representations of Lenin at the political history museum, frequent news briefs and restaurant reviews.
In the realm of studies, five students presented abstracts of their term papers to an audience of students and teachers as part of a university-wide student research conference. Some topics included insights on the LGBT community in Russia and the state of its civil liberties; shifting perspectives and significance of the parade of victory, a memorial to those who fought in WWII and a decidedly Soviet demonstration that perhaps has taken on more meaning since Putin came to power; the life and times of rock samizdat' in the seventies and eighties; and a comparative analysis of Chekhov's short story "Lady with a Dog" and Maupassant's "Mademoiselle Perle."
Finally, to the kids. Following Cecilia Leugers's initiative, many Spring 2009 students have attended a class of fifth graders who study English to give them opportunities to put theory to practice. While Bridgett Balliett and Andrew Remley have made themselves weekly available to children, ages 3 to 9, at an orphanage on Vasilievsky Island, where they play games with the kids, take them on walks, and excuse themselves at the end of the day for having to go and not being able to take the kids with them.
Nathan Cox, St. Petersburg
Alumni Ambassadors are ready to speak with you! - Russian Language and Area Studies 2010
American Councils has elected five Alumni Ambassadors for the Academic Year 2010-2011. Our Ambassadors are happy to answer any of your questions and to tell you about their experiences abroad. If you have a question you'd like to direct to any of the following ambassadors, please write to outbound@americancouncils.org. Please include in your subject "Alumni Ambassador Question." We will forward your question to our ambassadors.
Featured Student Notes
I’ve returned from Moscow, safe and sound! It was my first taste of travel, and I have to say, I absolutely loved it, and I can’t wait to travel again. Hands down one of the best weekends of my life—not THE best, but it’s definitely up there.
Thursday was a busy day. I intended to come right home after school, but I had a meeting with my RD and I stopped to buy flowers for my host family. Friday, in case you missed it, was International Women’s Day. Yes that’s a holiday. And yes, I will forever celebrate it. It can tend to be a rather expensive holiday, as you’re supposed to recognize all the women who contribute something to your life (teachers, family, etc.) but it’s the greatest feeling in the world getting flowers, just for being you. I bought Babushka and Ira a lit...
My wonderful whirlwind – and decidedly last‐minute – weekend trip to Russia’s “northern capital” was, as so many things here are, born of the fortuitous confluence of coincidence and circumstance. This is not my first stint in Moscow, nor my longest to date, and it surely won’t be my last; one technique I learned long ago to ensure my happiness here is to welcome spontaneity, to keep my eyes and mind open all the time, and to suspend my expectations that things will be as I imagine them to be. They never are.
Some longtime friends of mine, Moscow journalists with whom I worked several years ago, were headed to St. Petersburg for a long work weekend and suggested I come up to meet them. After hemming and hawing for days about the price of the train fare (two months in this ...
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