This blog’s conception occurred at an interesting crosscurrent of arrivals and departures for me here at Evergreen. Summer is like that. I’ve lived in Olympia for three years. My zip code has been 9850-something since September 2014, and I’ve yet to encounter a summer that didn’t come packaged with some radical change.
At school, some people take this time to work as temporarily full-time staff at their student job. I know Residence and Dining (RAD, the office that runs the on-campus living) hires the most student workers of any office, and plenty of my friends kept on with their jobs in Registration, in the Library, or in Academic Advising to bridge the long four months between Spring and Fall.
So in some way, Summer Quarter can be an extension of the same. But in my case, it heralds the arrival of the new, the chaotic. If I didn’t have my jobs at Evergreen in Admissions and the Library, I’d be flying loose with stress and existential dread right now.
On Friday (that’s 7/7/2017, a great day for flight!) I will be flying out of SeaTac airport on the first leg of my long journey to the little seaside town of Sinop, Turkey. I’m going with three other Greeners and a few students from other Universities around the country to meet an equitable pool of various experts working on the Sinop Kale Excavation. The Excavation is an exploration of the seaside fort’s pre-Greek and early Greek colonial settlement directed by Dr. Owen Doonan of California State University Northridge.
I can, and will, go on and on about the unique flexibility and design of study abroad programs at Evergreen. For now, let me say that Evergreen’s ability to accept transfer credit from other institutions without fuss primarily due to the freedom of earning a degree without constraining requirements means that we can chase an opportunity like this half-way around the world without fear of disrupting our degree path or wasting our time.
This journey began at the tail-end of last summer, in mid-August. I had just finished the brunt of my Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship with Dr. Ulrike Krotscheck [Evergreen’s wonderful professor in archaeology and classics] when she sent me an email. She invited a handful of her previous students to the SKE project. I remember the rush of fear, elation, and honor I felt reading her email about the project’s scope.
I’d been lounging in the library, staring out at the rooftops of Purce Halls which were still under construction at the time, wondering if I would seriously be in Turkey in less than a year. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, or didn’t have an interest, it was that I was struck by the immensity of this proposition. I was already planning on going to Ireland with an Evergreen program in the Spring. If I went to Turkey, I’d need to find: the money to go, a place to live when I returned from Ireland, jobs in the summer that wouldn’t mind my extended absence, and the gumption to do it.
And now, I’m a little over 48 hours from departure.
This is a huge adventure. It required a lot of quick maneuvering and uncertainty, but I would say that none of it would have been possible at another college. Sure, I have basically no other frame of reference. But Evergreen has played party to the defiant, self-actualizing strain inside me that wanted my education to work for me (which is why I came here) and crafted, I think, at least 50% of the gumption it took to get me to go.
Now the time has arrived. This blog will discuss my experiences abroad, of course, but it will also be the soundboard for my final quarter at Evergreen. I’ll be talking about preparing for an ILC, organizing your schedule around work, a full-time course load, and your life (very important), and reminiscing. Fall quarter will likely be my last full-time quarter at Evergreen before I graduate. This excavation is the late afternoon of my time as an undergraduate. Thanks for reading!