[Post Blog #10] Academic & Personal Growth from CETS.

Academic-wise, CETS wasn’t a requirement per se – not for my major (psychology), not for my minor (history and film studies). I first heard about CETS in a history class in late 2013, when a student who went on the trip in summer 2013 came in and gave a presentation on her experiences. It was meant to attract applicants, and it worked. I scrambled together and submitted an application within a week. I hadn’t looked back since.

The program introduction said clearly CETS would be an interdisciplinary program – geography, history, and music. I know history and music quite well, but not so much geography. Honestly, though, a major reason I wanted to go on CETS was this one class I took last summer, Memory and Commemoration in Europe. It was one of the hardest history course I ever took, but the most interesting of all. The course was about how to learn history, what angle to look at, what questions to ask when facing a piece of history. A bulk of the course content was related to Central Europe, and when I heard about CETS, I knew it was the study abroad program for me (okay, more like study, study abroad). Memory and commemoration fascinate me to no end, and CETS only enriched it for me. For instance, while on the trip (in Berlin, I believe), my history professor and I agreed to disagree that we have differing ideas about the design and significance of some of the memorials we’d seen. I’m partial for abstract designs, he for concrete, “direct” ones. That is one conversation that’ll always stay with me.

Perhaps the most striking lesson from CETS occurred in a form of a question. “What about home?” Do we commemorate this/that? If not, why? What does this/that statue mean? Why is it there? CETS taught me to keep asking questions, regardless of whether I have the answers right there and then. At the moment, I think I’m still in the “question” stage of things, but soon, I’ll like to move on to the “answer” stage, to start answering my own questions. Who doesn’t like having answers to their own questions?

Personal-wise, CETS was the longest period I spent with the same group of people. Intense human contact for 4 weeks in a row had its ups and downs (more of which, I’m not sure). The photo below shows all of us, minus two professors. Why this group photo, then? For reasons I don’t intend on going into here, this particular photo (that’s Budapest in the background, btw) sums up my personal growth. It reminds me that when you’re in a group, group needs take precedence over individual needs, period. I have a sudden urge to make that a life motto.

Figure 1: CETS 2014. View of Budapest from the Citadella.

I want to keep traveling. Exploring. Seeing. My last souvenir purchase in Kraków was a postcard saying “Getting lost helps you find yourself”.

Getting lost helps. But to find myself yourself? Plan for a detour in between. Or two. Or fifty.

(It just hit me that my “CETS song” is called Budapest. Just like the photo’s background. I don’t believe in coincidence.)

 

Picture references

UWEC CETS. (2014, June 22). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/UWEC_CETS/status/480697283965886464/photo/1