The Bard College Berlin Student Blog
Did you know that the average person spends around 80,000 hours of their life dedicated to their career? How to make these 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years as productive, impactful and rewarding as possible is what Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team address in their career guide, also named 80,000 Hours.
This was when I was never sure what I was doing. I had decided that the way for me to be happiest was to not think too hard about anything as long as it felt right. It was a time when I was a heathen and I was happy with how I had justified it.
Each fall break, BCB students disperse from leafy Pankow into the city of Berlin and beyond. While some students travel home, others take trips around Europe, and some use this valuable week to rest after midterms and explore Berlin. In this edition of “From the Archives,” we take a look at various excursions and adventures
Professor Vormann’s balanced and insightful answers to questions like ‘what is the future of work’, ‘should the welfare state be reinstated’, ‘what is the role of academia’, and others, shed light on these most basic but essential questions while also clarifying why they are important — why he cares for this subject matter and why we should, too.
A film belongs to the dark and can only be fully absorbed in the isolation of and submerged submission to sitting in a black room in front of a large bright screen. And so I search out these dark rooms. It involves a little fieldwork, scrutinizing some pamphlets, saturating my search history with movie theater websites…
During my first year at Bard College Berlin, I lived in the Waldrasse 16 dorm, or as we BCBers affectionately call it, W16. There I experienced for the first time sharing five bathrooms and one kitchen with around eighteen other students. I remember arriving at the building and thinking: this is going to be a mess.
“I’m going to the Thai Market.”
I didn’t react with a start. I merely cast a brief glance at the eager visitor in the doorway of my room and nodded silently, hopefully a nod that conveyed, “Have fun.” I was sure that I had heard incorrectly; the idea of home in a city so far away from the likes of my past seemed impossible. I returned my eyes to my computer screen, continuing my fervent search for activities in which I could partake on my first weekend in Berlin. I had an especially vigilant eye for anything that indicated hints of home.
“Do you want to come along? I could really go for Thai food right now.”
The images and videos of the protests are overwhelming. Human beings flood the streets in unity. They unite across generations and across nations. Children, adults, and the elderly from Dheli, Sydney, Tarawa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, London, Prague, Mexico City, Istanbul, Lahore, Seoul, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Jakarta have gathered on the streets. The list goes on and on. People march, lead, chant, sing, shout, and demand their right for a safe future. Each person is a drop in a sea of protest that draws our attention to a world-wide emergency. Climate change is happening and it threatens our very existence on earth.
As activists around the United States mobilize against the unacceptable conditions inside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, the agency continues its operations on the ground in American cities. On September 5th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot Jose Fernando Andrade-Sanchez in his car as he attempted to leave the Food Lion parking lot in Antioch, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville.
