If there’s one thing Northwestern does well, it’s New Student Week. As freshmen arrive on campus each September they are greeted by a wave of eager upperclassmen clad in a rainbow of “Wildcat Welcome” apparel. Was I naïve to assume this welcoming party to be the norm? Maybe if I’d shown up on time to Jerusalem I would have felt a bit more at ease about my transition to life overseas. However, when I showed up in the administrative building two weeks after the start of the mandatory summer language immersion program — after making a sweaty frail taxi driver loop around campus unsuccessfully searching for my accurate drop-off — I was given no such welcome.
“You’re showing up now? Do you realize what a big risk you took? What if all of the classes were filled up? What if there were no spaces left in the dorms? You expect them to just hold a room for you? Do you have any idea how many people we told they could not show up late?”
And so went my bombardment by more administrators with important titles than I could count. And then they told me to wait for ten minutes. I sat tallying the number of people I asked about arriving two weeks late and the number of identical answers I got—just show up, it won’t be a problem at all.
And then the director of the entire international school enters. Everyone leaves the room but the director of the language immersion program called Ulpan. The two of them sit looking at each other with expressions of complete bewilderment on their faces.
“I’m really sorry…” I began until I am cut off by the two frazzled administrators.
“Well, I see two options,” said the director of the international school. “Either you enter a class now, or you sit out of Ulpan.”
The fall semester program is set up beginning with the six-week Ulpan followed by a four-week break in class. The regular semester begins around the third week of October. If I were to not join an Ulpan class I would have nothing to do for precisely two months.
I had just finished my summer job on Sunday morning. I immediately hauled my butt to the airport without so much as stopping for lunch. I rode three flights across the world — New York to Munich, Munich to Vienna, and Vienna to Tel Aviv — because that was somehow the fastest route to Jerusalem and would mean I’d miss the fewest days of class.
And now I am finally sitting in Jerusalem about to be told by the director of the international school that all the butt hauling and lunch skipping was for nothing.
“I guess you’re here now,” he conceded. “You can join your class tomorrow.”
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