One of the most exciting aspects of my summer is something that I haven’t even mentioned yet: I am traveling to Tanzania, Africa in the month of May. Wooohooo!!!!
Maybe you have heard of “J-Terms” (June terms) with some other schools–where School gets out in late May, and students immediately study abroad for about a month to earn maybe one class credit. At Concordia, we finish our Spring semester on May 2nd this year, so we call our summer study abroad programs “May-Sems” (May seminars). 
This May-Sem is called “Women and Children of Tanzania.” Professor Bill Snyder (Remember him from my first blog?) will be taking me and five other students to several cities and townships all over Tanzania to visit women’s shelters, orphanages, schools, and medical clinics. For the most part, our purpose there is to observe the social systems for women and children in Tanzania and how they relate to the AIDS pandemic in Africa. According to most scholars, the very first step to slowing the spread of AIDS in third world countries is to improve living conditions, education, and social justice especially among women. If we go and observe these social systems, we will be more globally informed on ways to help the AIDS situation in Tanzania in a long-term sense. After all, “the purpose of Concordia College is to influence the affairs of the world by sending into society thoughtful and informed men and women dedicated to the Christian life.” (Concordia’s Mission Statement) (more…)
My two favorite classes that I’ve taken at Concordia, hands down, were both poetry writing courses taught by Prof. William Snyder. When I was a sophomore, I was in the Intro to Poetry Writing course. For the first few weeks of the course, Prof. Snyder (who insists on being called Bill) had us all read professional work and look closely at what separates great poetry from not-so-great poetry. We all practiced with in-class writing exercises until we were comfortable writing full poems on our own.