Ever since I can remember, I have been taking German classes. In Kindergarten, they revolved around animals and colors. In the sixth grade, we had graduated to mathematics. And now at Ohio State, I have taken courses about German history and the current political climate in Europe. Throughout all of this time learning German, it was my time living in a tiny Bavarian town that solidified my interest in the language and the country.

My best friend Annika’s father was from Germany, and her grandparents still live in a tiny, rural town called Taufkirchen. The summer after the tenth grade, we both decided to go stay with them for a month and attend the local high school. Living in Bavaria was a bit of a culture shock. It is extremely isolated and homogenous, and unlike most cities in Germany, there were a lot of people who didn’t speak any English. Including her grandparents.

Attending the high school was also unlike any experience I had ever had in Germany. Unlike the previous time I had studied there, I had no exchange student whose job it was to show me the ropes and walk me around places. Nobody to tell me how the cafeteria worked or where my next class was. I was separated from Annika, and we were both assigned a course schedule for the next couple of weeks. It was definitely nerve wracking to jump head first into a German high school and German courses, and in retrospect I wish I was more open from the very beginning. But once I got over the feeling of always being lost, it was an incredible learning experience about the education system in Germany and it definitely improved my confidence in my German speaking ability.

Next Spring, I want to be challenged again in a similar way by spending a full semester in Germany. There is no equivalent to being pushed this far outside my comfort zone, and I know that participating in real German courses, hopefully at Bonn University, will both improve my German fluency and provide important new takes on the disciplines I am studying. Because so much of education is about perspective, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, there is no doubt in my mind that learning about the past and how to interpret the present in a different country will greatly improve my critical thinking abilities. Having experienced all of this on a smaller scale in Taufkirchen, I am looking forward to this new experience living in Germany next year.

When I signed up for a Middle Eastern History course the summer before my freshman year, I was completely outside of my comfort zone. It was my first college level history course, and it was also the first time I had ever taken a history class that focused on countries that weren’t in the West. There was definitely an initial roadblock: in middle school and high school curriculums there is little to no focus on MENA’s history.

Once I got to Ohio State, I signed up for History of U.S.-Africa Relations. Once again, there were large initial challenges to taking in the material, as I had little to no background on any of the countries we were discussing. It meant that the course had to move more slowly than the professor would have liked, and that lots of details about the international politics and developments went over my head.

Experiencing history at the college level has definitely increased my awareness of these huge gaps in essential background information in the U.S.’s education system – this has become one of my main policy interests over the last couple of years. The history curriculum in elementary and high schools in the U.S. is definitely lacking in breadth, and looking back it would have been more helpful to have an introduction to the colonization of Africa or the 1948 Arab-Israeli war than to examine the War of 1812 on repeat.

In the end, taking the college courses that I have has definitely been worth it. It’s rewarding to leave a course feeling that I have a more comprehensive understanding of the way the world works, and also that I have so much more to learn. But I can’t help but wonder about the people that don’t take those courses at the college level (because let’s face it, most people don’t go to college and major in History). Because education, especially during elementary school, does so much to shape one’s world view, I would love to potentially find some outlet to get involved in education policy in the future. Being better informed about history outside of the West early on certainly can’t hurt, and it could make all the difference.

I have attached my final papers for my History of the Middle East and History of U.S.-Africa Relations courses below.  My U.S.-Africa Relations paper wound up focusing on the connections between media, U.S. public opinion, ad humanitarian aid during the Biafran War. The shorter paper for the Middle Eastern History course was about the role of women in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

The Role of Women in the Iranian Revolution – History of the Middle East

War of Words – History of U.S.-Africa Relations

When I first enrolled in History 2800H, Introduction to Historical Thought with Dr. Susan Lawrence, I wasn’t completely sold on becoming a History major. I had a vague idea of what I thought the discipline meant academically, but I hadn’t completely evaluated whether it was something I wanted to dedicate four years of my life to. Throughout the course we worked on developing a precise writing style, ability to extract information from primary sources, and how to establish historical frameworks. But the key aspect of the course was writing a research proposal. We had been compiling sources and information for a ten-page proposal from the beginning, and this was the longest I had ever worked on developing a single paper.

The constant changes to my thesis and area of focus constituted a major learning curve. This ever-changing nature of the research is something that, while at first intimidating, became something I love about research in this discipline, allowing for flexible projects and new influences. I started out with a regional focus, Germany, and a focus on the history of integration policy during the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) influx in the 1960s and 1970s.  Based on sources I found and new paths they led down, I had to adjust my proposal. I ended up narrowing my field to the impact of urban planning on religious expression in 1960s and 70s religious expression in the Berlin immigrant community of Kreuzberg 36.

Initially I had a lot of difficulty locating sources that were helpful, but after getting more comfortable using online databases and searching the stacks, I located archival, primary, and secondary sources. A lot of these sources were in German, so translating them was time consuming and often frustrating. In the end though, the project not only improved my ability to conduct research but also confirmed by interest in the discipline of history. I now hope to conduct more research in the next year or so and hopefully work towards an honors thesis in History.

I found the process very grounding and wound up asking a lot of questions about the research I was conducting. Why had I chosen this particular topic? Was I the right person to research this, and was my own bias visible in the product? While I hope to change the focus of my research slightly in the future, I know that I will use the work I have done so far as a basis on which to build. I am looking forward to hopefully researching in Germany in the future, where the sources I would need to complete my project would be more readily available. After getting a taste for what the process is like, I know that writing an undergraduate thesis here at Ohio State will be worthwhile in itself, but also as valuable preparation for graduate school of any kind.