Prompt: Describe and reflect on a risk you’ve taken.
Guten Morgen, Klasse. Sind alles von Ihnen bereit?
When I started taking German, all the other pre-meds were shocked. The only reason to take a language class (besides Latinm, if you wanted to get a jump on medical school terms) was to finish the language requirement. Otherwise, it was a big waste of time and one and a half credits. One and a half credits equals three labs equals three more pre-med classes out of the way. It does not equal Freizeit to take whatever reeking-of-humanities classes you want.
I do a lot of things to surprise other pre-meds, just for kicks (being social, going out, having friends…), but German – this one was for me. A summer in Berlin and Switzerland and a few German Mann romances (ok, flings) were all it took to leave me enthralled by the German people, their troubled history, and their underappreciated Muttersprache. I saw a beauty and an organization in the language that charmed me in the exact opposite of the way the supposedly attractive but actually amorphous and un-learnable feeling of the romance languages had confused me.
Actually taking Deutsch, though, was another matter. The disparaging remarks of ex-boyfriend and language connoisseur Rene in mind (“You’re just not a language person. Keep working on orgo”), I was a little afraid of what the Yale German department was going to throw at me. Turns out, though, that I already knew a lot of terms and didn’t have trouble memorizing the rest. Being pre-med has taught me to stuff information in my brain, and the Germans dominated chemistry in the 1800s, so I knew words like “together,” “opposite,” and “both,” already. This is all to say: easy A, with intellectual interest in the bag. Biochemistry? Yeah right – I’ve found the best class for pre-meds at Yale.
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