I first heard about it from my mom when I was in eighth grade because she had a student going there to learn Chinese. At the time, if you did the program you received a laptop and some money, but it isn't that way anymore. Anyway, I didn't really think I would ever end up actually applying and getting in and crap, but last spring I just went for it and I was accepted into the Arabic program.
This meant that I would spend almost half of my summer living in a dorm at Kent State, which before I got there I didn't know what to make of. The program was totally free: food, dorm room, the 10 credit hours, everything. I heavily considered not going because I wanted to have a happy, carefree summer, but it was a good thing I did accept. It was the best summer of my life and the best experience of my life.
I had about 4 days off of school before I left to go to Kent, meaning that school got out for summer break on a Tuesday, so I had Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to get in all of the summer activities I could. When I arrived, I was given a key and I went up to my dorm room. We were in Stopher which was the honors dormitory, so our room was pretty tricked out. For being a college dorm it was anyways. We had out own bathroom, shower, sink, mirror, thermostat, the like.
So once I got there, I just waited with my dad for about 15 minutes for my roommate arrive. Her name was Kaitlyn and she was awesome. We got along really well, we had everything in common. We went down to the student center and got out IDs and then we went to the first night dinner. At that point I had no idea what was in store and I was kind of nervous to find out. My dad left after the dinner and then we had a small meeting with our class and a culture activity, and after that we were left to ourselves. The Arabic class ended up playing cards and hanging out for awhile, getting to know each other.
We weren't the only language group there though- the 12 Arabic language students were joined by 12 Chinese language students and I think 10 Hindi language students. Each language had it's own lounge, but all three lounges were in a row with one hallway between them. To get to the Arabic lounge, you had to pass through both the Chinese and the Hindi lounges, which was how we ended up getting to know the other kids, by seeing them on our way through.
My daily schedule was like this, every day.
8am- Wake up, walk to the hub and get some coffee.
9am- Class until 12
Noon- Lunch until 1
1pm- More class until 3
3pm- Free time, aka nap time or watch the world cup time until 5pm
5pm- Dinner in the lounge
6pm- Cultural Activity (movie, documentary, Arabic games, field trip, dancing)
9pm- Study Time
11pm- Curfew. Most people would get back to their rooms at around 11 on the dot, I would regularly get out of study time around 10:30 and listen to music or something by myself instead.
Somewhere between 11:30 and 12:30ish- Night check-in thing. Our RA would come and give us our score for the day of participation in cultural activities and language use. I almost always got 10/10 "The Republic of Ashra" and my roommate normally got an 8/10 "The Island of Thamanya"
On Saturdays and Sundays we had projects and skits to do instead of class, but we were in the classroom around maximum 10 hours a day, minimum 7. The Hindi and Chinese students called it the bat cave.
After about 3 days I realized that I wasn't going to make it through the program without some people outside of Arabic to talk to, so I made friends with some of the Chinese kids and some of the Hindi kids. One of the best things about the program was the people. Every single person there had applied because they wanted to learn a language- and every single person there was working hard to do so. Every single person there was worth getting to know, and I made a lot of friends I'll never forget.
I particularly enjoyed the culture time- especially the documentaries we watched. I didn't really like the dancing because I really don't like to dance, but that's another post for another time. The field trips we went on were to a mosque, to an eastern orthodox church, and to the Arab-American museum in Dearborn, Michigan. We ate some awesome food along the way as well.
I had a minor breakdown after one night when I tried to sacrifice sleep in order to finish all of my homework. The schedule was far too rigid to skip sleeping because there was no extra time to catch up on sleep- no true weekends.
I wouldn't encourage every one I know to do this. If you do well in language class without finding much need to study, if you're willing to open your mind to another culture (really think about whether or not that's you- everyone wants to believe that they're open minded but consider it heavily.) and if you are willing to put in the work you should apply. There are always a million reasons not to do something (yes, I'm pretty sure that's an office quote) but there are millions more reasons of why you should.
You will get everything out of the foreign language academy that you want to get out of it. That's my guarantee.
OH and if anyone from fla is reading this, I'm going to make a separate post for Daoud because this is already a super long post and I could write about him for a really long time.
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