Russian Studies Course with Yale Summer Session

This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Batumi, Georgia, with Yale
Summer Session. I lived in an apartment with a Russian-speaking family who had relocated to
Batumi from Moscow several years prior. Meanwhile, I took classes with Yale and Vassar
professors as well as local Georgian professors in Russian language (the equivalent of two
semesters worth of Third Year Russian) as well as a class covering Russian and Georgian
literature, culture, and film. Outside of class, I joined the program for culturally-enriching
outings to a Georgian dance performance, the Nobel Brothers Museum, the Roman ruins outside
Batumi, and even a several-day trip to the sublimely picturesque mountainous region of Svaneti,
where we saw villages and customs preserved since medieval times. After 7 weeks of class at
Batumi’s EURO-2000 school, we spent the last week of the program traveling around Georgia,
visiting the city of Kutaisi, Stalin’s birthplace of Gori, and numerous monasteries before
finishing the trip in Georgia’s sprawling capital of Tbilisi.

I decided to apply for this program because it would plunge me into a world that was
both culturally and linguistically foreign to me. I thought that it offered a rare opportunity to go
to a place with fairytale beauty and rich history but relatively off the radar of those in America. It
was everything I hoped it to be and more. I came back with a renewed perspective both on
Georgia itself, on Russia and its role in the former Soviet sphere, on the politics of the region,
and even on my own country. In addition, both through classwork and through constant exposure
to professors, taxi drivers, restaurant servers, and tour guides, my Russian language skills
improved exponentially. I also came to understand through the window of Russian how language
plays a very important role in politics, particularly in newly independent countries that maintain
complicated relationships with their neighbors, and how in this way history reverberates in the
day to day lives of people.

All in all, I had a fantastic time in Georgia, and the program was an experience and an
opportunity that I could not have got anywhere else and will likely never have again