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Alumni on ECLA

Ana Antic, Serbia
Attended: International Summer University 2004 & Project Year 2004/05
Currently: PhD student, History, Columbia University

Partly because of its size but primarily because of its teaching philosophy, ECLA offers a very unique, invaluable educational experience. Due to its intensity, enthusiasm, curiosity and sheer breadth of research interests, the academic environment that I encountered there could not really compare to anything I had experienced before coming to Berlin. The kind of attention that students get at ECLA in their academic development is unparalleled - with a small number of students and an unbelievably generous student-faculty ratio, ECLA professors were almost constantly available for consultations, discussions, brain-storming, and willing to invest their time and help in any way they could whenever we would simply stop by their offices without any prior appointment (I tried this at other places - didn't work). Now that I am myself a teaching assistant, these experiences prove precious as a model for a student-teacher relationship I am attempting to establish.

I think of it as a true privilege to have worked with such an exceptional group of young and dedicated faculty, which created an exciting atmosphere of learning, original research, heated discussions but also some pretty fascinating and durable friendships. I also always thought of ECLA as an experimental college of sorts with regard to its curriculum. Although it does also offer conventional areas of study or traditional approaches to them, ECLA gave us a chance to experiment freely with interdisciplinarity, pushing us to test the limits of our respective disciplines' ability to combine their insights. This was at times frustrating, but mostly really rewarding exercise from which we learnt a lot about our own areas of study and how exactly they relate (or do not relate) to others. ECLA also offered an opportunity to take what I would call unconventional courses in history, literature, philosophy, film studies, the originality and intelligence of whose approach often made me rethink my own research interests and preferred methodology.

Finally, the Project Year with its year-long research assignment helped me immensely to prepare for graduate-level research work that I am pursuing at the moment. I chose my research topic and had to learn how to defend that choice throughout; with my advisor I worked on methodology and went carefully through every step of a slow, demanding but eventually very exciting research process; and in the end, I learnt how to put together the amazing amount of research materials and scattered notes into a relatively coherent final product. Throughout this process, I was treated with respect as a partner in discussion, but was also never spared challenging questions about my work and its purpose, which helped improve my thinking and writing in innumerable ways.