Here I am last weekend on the Kinneret with some fellow redheads. (gingi in hebrew!)

Whew...
I made it through my first week of graduate school and it is no joke.


First, a resolution. Once the semester starts in full force, I have no idea if I will have time keep doing this, but when I do, I am determined to cut down on my typos. We'll see how it goes. . .


Okay, that's out of the way.
So... there are 15-17 people in my program and we take 4 seminars (each 2-2.5 hours a week) plus 10 hours of Hebrew a week. To summarize what I will say in the next several paragraphs - the people are great, eclectic, smart, interesting, motivated. And there is a near-incomprehensible amount of work to do.

Let's get the less happy stuff out of the way. So, Hebrew is tough, but what I expected. Lots of vocabulary to memorize and grammatical concepts to learn. Luckily there is a lot of time to apply it in my daily life - although somewhat less so now that I am spending so much time at the international school speaking English. The challenge for me here is mastering the material that I learned on my own in a very compressed amount of time since arriving here.

The other 4 classes are interesting - Community Psychology, Philanthropy, The Third Sector and Civil Society, and Organizational Theory of Non-Profits... The profs are from the school of social work at the University and teach similar classes to the Israelis studying non-profit management. They have impressive credentials - 3 of them have already been flying back and forth to the states for conferences in their fields at Columbia, UPenn etc... The philanthropy prof is a CEO of a major Israeli foundation. They know their material and are excited to be teaching in the new program. (My program, by the way, is called Community Leadership, Philanthropy Studies and Non Profit Management.) So what's the downside - well, there's one copy of each book on campus in one of three libraries so this week has been a frenzy of making photocopies for everyone in the class. It's time consuming, expensive and a bit of a scavenger hunt all in one. But we've broken up into teams of 4 and plan to spend all day on Sunday making readers for the entire semester.

Then there are the papers! Each class has at least 1 project and at least 1 paper - 15 to 50 pages... except for one class that has a test. And of course, that will probably all come to a big old crescendo at the end of the semester! Can't wait!

Okay, no complaints - it's grad school. This is the point. Reading and writing. The subject matter is interesting and so are the people...

My class is a very interesting mix... there are three of us with backgrounds in urban education. Several people are coming from the for-profit sector. Everyone is between 22 and 29. Three women come from backgrounds working with the Jewish Agency and Otzma. But it is definitely not a program that is focusing on Jewish Communal Leadership, specifically. (I was worried this might be the case.) We have a few observant Christians, a Palestinian lawyer from Ramallah, and women from Amsterdam, Moscow, and Buenas Aires. The only under-represented group is men! There are only 2 in the program.

This weekend I am headed to a nearby town called Qadima for shabbat. I am going with a girl named Emily who is amazing- has spent time at Isabella Freedman, is a vegan, shares many of my loves...