2020
JYM ALUMNI NEWS A NEWSLETTER FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS OF THE JUNIOR YEAR IN MUNICH
SPECIAL EDITION! JYM wishes Mark Ferguson a Happy Retirement!
A Wild and Windy Road: 25 Years as JYM Program Director -By Dr. Mark Ferguson, JYM Program Director, 1995-2020
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t was summer 1995 when Louise Speed picked me up from the airport and asked me what I thought about the idea of being the Program Director of the Junior Year in Germany programs in Munich and Freiburg. I was just returning from Germany where I had been doing research on early cinema in the industrial Ruhrgebiet. Four years earlier I had arrived at Wayne State University. Before that I had a one-year sabbatical replacement position at Bates College in Maine, and before that I spent two years teaching at the Universität Essen in the Ruhrgebiet. Even though I started at Wayne State in fall of 1991 with a one-year lectureship (possibly renewable from one year to the next, but with no guarantee), I naively thought that if I just remained calm and patient, a tenure-track job might open up in Detroit. Life was good, teaching was fun and the biggest stress I had was whether to wait until 11pm or midnight before walking over a few blocks to the Music Menu Cafe in Detroit’s Greektown to wind down after a “stressful” day of preparing the next day’s classes. Little did I know how my life would change when I accepted the appointment as Program Director! The idea of becoming the Program Director of the Munich and Freiburg programs sounded like a lot of fun. For one, I figured I knew all about study abroad, after all I had been an AFS student to Thailand in high school and a Junior Year in Freiburg student while an undergraduate at UW-Madison. Plus I had studied and/or worked in Mainz, Bonn, Berlin, Paris and Essen. What else was there to know? Boy, was I in for a lesson!
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