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My Fulbright Life
Transcript For: Katie Sergrist, ETA, Germany
August 11, 2009
Katie Sergrist, English Teaching Assistant to Germany, discusses her Fulbright Experience with Lee Rivers.
Katie Segrist, ETA, Germany
Lee: Hello and welcome to this
edition of My Fulbright Life. I’m your host, Lee Rivers, and I want to thank
you for your listening support.
Hello, today I’m joined
by Katie Segrist and she’s going to share a little bit about her Fulbright
experience in Germany
with us. How are you doing today Katie?
Katie: I’m doing very well, how are you?
Lee: I’m doing great, I’m doing
well. Thanks for taking time out of your day to join me. I really appreciate
it.
Katie: No problem.
Lee: And so Katie, get us going
here by telling us exactly where in Germany you’re studying and also
talk a little bit about what you’re doing for your Fulbright project.
Katie: OK. Well, right now I’m living in
Münster, Germany, famous for its bicycles.
There’s a lot of bicycles here. Anyway, but I teach in Warendorf, Germany which
is just a 30 minute train ride away, 28 kilometers I think. And, for the first
6 months that I was in Germany
I was living in Warendorf with a wonderful host family, they just took me in
and they were both teachers. One of them is a teacher at the school. But I’m in
Münster and I’m a foreign language assistant- ???- which means that my project, I’m with the
group not on the research grant but with the assistant teaching grant. And so I
spend a lot of my time in the school following around other teachers and it
sounds silly just following them around, but I don’t actually take a class on
my own, unless it’s an afterschool activity. But, I help teach English as a Foreign
Language to kids in the ages, well from 5th grade to thirteenth
grade, it’s called a gymnasium. And the gymnasium is their system, their
educational system, the highest level of those children planning on going on to
a university. And I get to teach theatre and do creative, fun English things. I
love learning German, so even though most of the time I do speak in English- I
think it’s best for them to learn- I do learn German every day and I learn more
about my own language every day. So I don’t have a name or a title of my
project, that’s what I’m doing.
Lee: What led you to initially look
at the Fulbright program and what led you to apply for it?
Katie: OK, well I had studied abroad in
Southern Germany, Bavaria, in a little village
called Eichstatt, at the Katholische
Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, and I spent 5 months there which was
kind of a strange happening to begin with because I had applied to study
abroad- I went to Nebraska
Wesleyan University-
and they have a really great study abroad program. And so I was going to study
abroad through, well, probably go to Ireland
or England
or something. And then I just decided, changed my mind, going to go to Germany,
that would be better because I had taken German in highschool and I wanted to
really immerse myself. So I was in Eichstatt,
Germany and
when I came home I was so impressed with the five months I had there, it
completely changed my life, and my way of viewing the world and my culture. I
had been walking through our university to go get a registry for classes for my
last year, my senior year, and a professor, from Nebraska Wesleyan, she saw me
as I walked by her class, by her office and she said, “Katie, hi, how was
Germany?” And I told her about it, just a brief little sum up and she said,
“Well, are you applying for the Fulbright?” And I had heard of the name
Fulbright before a lot, with a lot of respect said to it, a lot of admiration
for those who get it, and I had assumed… why would I apply for this? It’s not
that I- I don’t know why, it’s just one of those things that we think about
ourselves, like, Oh, well that’s not me. But she really encouraged me, said
here, take this packet, this brochure and look at it. And when I started
reading about the opportunities in Germany, to go back to this country
that I really was impressed with and loved learning the language and to do
teaching, which I have a lot of experience in, a lot of education classes in.
It’s something that I want to do. So for me it was really perfect. I want to
maybe someday teach English as a Foreign Language or teach German- I don’t
really know yet. That’s how I got introduced to the Fulbright program. When I
read about it, I said, oh my gosh I actually could do this, so sent it in.
Lee: And so, you mentioned that you
had a theatre background, are you able to use that? You also mentioned English
teaching background as well. What did you study, and how has it related to what
you’re doing right now?
Katie: Alright, well, I graduated with a
bachelors in English, and then that can be divided up into a couple of
sections, English Education, English Literature, Creative Writing. And I ended
up doing Creative Writing and chose that for my final. And my—the only word
that was coming into my head was the German word ??? —my minor, sorry, was theatre. And I really
liked directing more than acting so it’s very much fun to be able to use that.
I already got to direct a 13th grade class in a Shakespeare
performance for a big open house. They did a scene from Romeo and Juliet and
it’s amazing how bright these kids are and how great their system is when
they’ve been starting younger and younger.
They’ve been starting children in 6th grade learning English
and another foreign language. So it’s pretty great to see after a few years of implementing
this, these kids, they blow me away every day how much they understand. And I
say kids, but a lot of them are only 4 or 5 years younger than me. So one of my
favorite things that I get to do is direct and I’m directing a group of 6th
grade class right now, not a whole class, it’s totally voluntary just kids that
come every Thursday after school to meet with Katie and do a little skit in
English. So that’s so much fun. They’re the beginners, that I have to explain
so much in German, and they always
giggle when I make a mistake and help me out. And I also teach an 8th
grade theatre group and that’s only 4 girls and they have a lot of spunk and
it’s always a lot of fun. I always find myself laughing right along with them
instead of saying, come on! Get serious, let’s do this thing.
Lee: Very cool. Well, I’m going to
switch gears on you here a little bit Katie and I would like you to talk about
a highlight from your experience thus far, something that really sticks out in
your mind as being significant. What would that highlight be?
Katie: Well, it would probably have to
be a Thanksgiving dinner that I made, not alone, my friend Maggie who’s also a
Fulbrighter, and Rachel and my boyfriend Matt, we all work together and bought
a huge turkey, which was a big deal for me because I had just stopped being a
vegetarian. So you know, whoo! Buy a big turkey, carry it home. And I cooked a
traditional Thanksgiving meal for a group of teachers who I had been working
with and our host family and their 3 children. Well, they have 4 children but
one girl is studying abroad in Canada.
So we had to bring in extra tables, and move furniture out of the way to
accommodate about 20 people for a huge Thanksgiving feast in the dining room of
our host family. And there was a bunch of Americans cause there’s a lot of
Fulbrighters who line in… I mean if there’s so many teaching in Germany,
or so many opportunities for them that there are a lot of friends in the
vicinity who I can relate with and whenever I want to speak in English I can go
and talk to them. Whenever I want to talk about the program and what’s going on
I can talk to them. So they were there, and a girl from England too. She came. I had all
these teachers, one former teacher who I had actually never worked with but
she’s from England,
invited her. So it was really multi-culti is what my host mother said, multi
culti. Multi-cultural experience. And I got to teach them all a little bit
about a tradition that we do in America.
And it’s really fun when they see, oh, Americans can cook! Wow, I thought you
all ate McDonalds. Ha ha. It’s not so bad, it’s just what they are fed in the
media sometimes.
Lee: Katie, talk about a challenge
that maybe you didn’t anticipate before going to Germany on your Fulbright
experience but how have you faced that challenge and how have you worked
through it.
Katie: Yeah, I… that’s an interesting
question because I’m still working through it right now I think. What I had
expected was, oh no, I’m a young teacher being put in front of students, let
alone students of another language, but students alone. And I was wondering if
they would respect me, or if I could communicate well with them, and what I
found was that the challenge was more with the other teachers who I work with
about different tactics. I had known, well, I’m just an assistant so I’ll help
out, but there are a lot of different teaching schools of thought that,
especially cultural differences in the classroom. There have been only positive
experiences with all the teachers I work with, only positive. This isn’t
something that’s a problem that I feel like, oh no I need to go talk to someone
about this. I get along very well with all of them but it’s interesting when
the way that I would handle a class and the way that they would or ah….
Especially with discipline in the schools. They’re great kids but often don’t
respect that someone’s up talking. And I know that when I was in highschool, if
we were talking, and we were told to stop talking we’d probably be kicked out
of the class! And so, it’s kind of strange to me when I see a different
culture, but then again what the challenge I didn’t anticipate is, well not the
challenge, that is the challenge, but what I didn’t anticipate was seeing the
very good sides of this, that it’s not such an authoritarian position, above
the classroom. You get to relax and talk with them, let them feel like they can
always say their mind. Yeah, I guess it’s just dealing with education through a
different culture’s eyes was the biggest challenge for me.
Lee: And so, a big part of the
reason why we do these podcasts is so current Fulbrighters can let people know
back home, encourage people back home to apply and also give advice as
individuals are working through the application process. So Katie what advice
can you give back to our listeners who are thinking about applying for the
Fulbright this upcoming October?
Katie: Well, first of all, with the
application, those are hefty and kind of scary, when you have to write a page
about yourself and, if you’re applying for the other one, two pages about your
project, and you think, Oh! a page, two pages but it’s not about quantity, it’s
about quality, what you put in it. So that can be really stressful, but my best
advice is, don’t do what I did and make sure you get enough sleep and eat
really well while you’re working on them instead of getting scared and thinking
you have to finish them cause it’ll go a lot cleaner and more peacefully if you
can take care of yourself before you try to take care of anything that
stressful, along with your studies at the same time and maybe a job. So, just
try to relax and be honest, be yourself and ask for help from any professors,
any people who you think could help you ask the right questions about it. Yeah.
Believe in yourself! You can do it!
Lee: Very good advice. Well Katie
this is about all the time that we have for today but I just want to thank you
once again for chatting with me.
Katie: Thank you, Lee, for calling me
and thinking of me.
Lee: Certainly. Well, enjoy the
rest of your time in Germany
and hopefully I’ll get in touch with you when you come stateside.
Katie: Great, bye bye.
Lee:
Alright, take care. This
concludes this episode of My Fulbright Life. Goodbye.
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