Alex, ‘12

  Spring Break is palpable.  The mood on campus is perhaps only matched by the Hebrews circa 39 years into their Sinai sojourn, with everyone similarly hoping they don’t drop dead after catching only a token glimpse of the Promised Land.

  The break is even more tangible for me, as most of my mid-terms took place this past week.  As the rest of campus runs about looking like the executive board of AIG, I enter this exam week with both a history and Spanish mid-term already in my wake.  I am certain that one of those exams was a great success (three guesses which one that was…)

  This morning I returned from the final Army ROTC training weekend of the school year.  It had quite a kick-off.  Two separate flights of Black Hawk helicopters landed on UR’s intramural sports fields, and the Spider Battalion loaded its gear and was air-lifted to Fort A.P. Hill in northern Virginia.

  There followed two days of pretty fun and high-speed training in land navigation and simulated combat exercises.  It was cold and wet almost the entire time, but that made it all the better; after a few months as a fat and happy college student, it was necessary to put some callouses back on my pampered hands.

  It hasn’t quite sunk in that this was my final ROTC training exercise of the academic year.  Cliche as it sounds, I truly can’t believe how fast my freshman year has passed.  To all you prospective students out there: Enjoy senior year while you can- you’ll be a sophomore in college before you know it.

  After an initially promising opening salvo my relations with the Spanish language have soured.

  I blame geography for my current predicament.  (Not really- I’m a firm advocate of personal responsibility, but bear with me.)  I love these United States, but the double-edged sword that is the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has ensured that many of us have never had to acquire the multilingual know-how of most other citizens of the globe.  And when we do happen to venture out beyond our linguistic ramparts, we find a world where most everyone speaks English (if only to keep us from butchering their native tongues- ask me about my trip to France sometime).

  So there’s my alibi for why I’m having a rough time in Spanish; now for the moral of the story.  UR has a large amount of international students, many of whom I’ve become close friends with.  Hanging out with them these past months has really opened my eyes to the possibilities availiable for acquiring new languages and cultural knowledge.  Many international students speak three, four, even five languages.  This ability to navigate between worlds impressed from the moment I arrived at school, and for me it is one of the joys of attending UR. 

  Thus, through social osmosis, they’ve given me a bit of inspiriation to hop back on the Spanish horse and keep giving it the old college try.  I recovered my textbook from my introductory Spanish course from first semester- which I had fortunately refrained from setting alight- and began a refresher course.  Once more into the breach.