Partying With The Kids (a.k.a. My Convergence Family)

Last week, my Convergence class got together for alcohol and two-for-one appetizers at Heidelberg. I thought it unlikely, but I actually enjoyed hanging out with these kids (average age of people in this picture minus me=21.2). It's our second semester, and we've had several get-togethers since Fall (always with alcohol involved). This group was formed in August, when we found ourselves in the same major. When I first enrolled at the Journalism School, I was persuaded by my adviser to enroll in the Convergence sequence instead of Broadcasting, as I had first planned.

It turns out that Convergence was the first new major of the J-School in 50 years. (I saw later that this meant they were still trying to work out the kinks in the sequence) Learning how to report across different media platforms (radio, TV, print, online) sounded interesting, so I signed up. I was the only foreigner in my class, and only one of two grad students, so last semester was rather challenging. We had a lot of group reporting and at times it was very stressful, as I have previously written.

This semester, we have less group work (really NOT my strongest point), so it's been less difficult for me, and seeing my classmates has been more pleasant. I've learned more about them, and a couple of them have become real friends. One nice thing about my convergence class is that there's some semblance of community (I have found that this does not occur here as naturally as it does back home). Being the J-School's guinea pigs for a new major formed a strange sort of bond. It was probably all that collective bitching about not understanding anything in our classes that brought us together.