Three months of no school makes Global Liberal Studies majors free to spend our days however we want. We have travelled back to the different countries we call home and said goodbye to New York City for now, but we’re all still connected through the memories of the classes we shared last school year. While you think about what concentration you want to do or what your senior thesis is going to be, you are probably doing at least one of these five things this summer.
1. Read
Though we read a lot of books during the school year for class, we rarely have the time to read the books we are truly interested in. As riveting as Dante’s The Inferno is, sometimes we want to reread Harry Potter or explore books that have been newly published, and the summertime is the perfect time to do so.
2. Sleep
Like many other majors, GLS students do not get nearly enough sleep during the school year. We’re too busy writing papers, taking notes, and studying vocabulary for our foreign language classes to get the eight hours we need every night. On top of that, we live in New York City! If we aren’t studying, we are exploring.
3. Travel
Speaking of exploring, GLS students love to travel during the summer. I mean, we are Global Liberal Studies majors, whose primary course of study is to learn about the different cultures that make up the world around them. You tell me, what’s the best way to observe the world than to go out and see it for yourself?
4. Work
Okay, this is another one that isn’t exactly specific to GLS majors at NYU, but most of us spend our summertime working part-time jobs or interning for companies that are changing the world. We are a relatively new major and don’t exactly know how to explain ourselves to family members and friends at different universities (“It’s kind of like international relations?”), so we start getting work experience early to help explain our interests and look better on our résumés to future employers.
5. Friends
I don’t just mean the friends we have had since middle school, but the friends we are constantly making along the way. At NYU, we spend our time with other GLS students in our GLS-only classes. You’d think this would make us exclusive and not want to be friends with people from other majors, but our curriculum actually has the opposite effect on our social skills.
We crave meeting people who study different material from us because our major makes us want to constantly learn. We want to talk to that Engineering major from a state school about what their typical day is like and tell them about how much we loved Social Foundations but couldn’t get into Cultural Foundations! We have been taught to accept a globalized community and we want to do all we can to learn from those with diverse backgrounds and areas of study.
Just because it’s summertime does not mean that Global Liberal Studies majors stop learning. From June to August, we will make the world our playground until we all return to NYU in the fall and continue the arduous but oh-so-fun process of getting our special Global Liberal Studies degree. But until then, we will appreciate the time we have off to have fun.
