Student Achievements
Oberlin College senior Nika Knight is one of 20 outstanding young journalism students in the United States chosen to take part in internXchange, a highly competitive new summer internship program in Berlin for American journalism students conducted by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
“A comparative literature major and a German minor, Nika is especially interested in the connections among art history, German literature, and the German language,” says Elizabeth C. Hamilton, chair and associate professor of German, who informed Knight about the program. “The German department congratulates Nika warmly.”
Knight’s advanced proficiency in German and experience as a journalist at Oberlin were major factors in her selection for the program, which promotes international journalism. She is editor of the Oberlin Review’s arts section, and she works with student writers in the College’s Writing Center.
From June 8 through August 21, she will study at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she will expand her academic understanding of Germany’s politics, society, culture, current social conditions, and media scene; tour Germany with journalism students from the independent states of the former Soviet Union; and undertake an intensive five-week internship with a major German publication.
“I spent my junior year at the Freie Universität,” says Knight. “Studying journalism there this summer will be incredible. Because DAAD is so well respected in Germany, its interns are taken seriously, and articles by them have appeared in the leading newspapers. I will be working side by side with some of the most influential journalists in Berlin. That kind of immersion will help me gain the experience and the connections I need to apply for journalism jobs and master’s programs in the fall.”
Knight says Oberlin has amply prepared her for the internship. “The language instruction and encouragement I’ve received have been invaluable. They have given me the confidence I will definitely need when I have to read and write news articles in German.
“Working behind-the-scenes at the Review has helped me to understand the complicated process involved in putting out a weekly newspaper and the effort everyone involved undertakes to do so. Plus, being immersed in editing other people's writing in the Writing Center has given me a much more critical eye, and that has helped my own writing an enormous amount.
“In Germany I'm going to be immersed very quickly in a radically different model of writing and understanding journalism, which will be a good way to more fully understand my own approach to journalism, whether I work at an international publication or at home. I know I am about to be hugely challenged and will learn a whole lot. Right now, I can't wait to go back to Berlin and get started.”
“Oberlin is nothing if not incredibly supportive,” stresses Knight. “Professor Hamilton offered me a huge amount of encouragement. She and Steven Huff, associate professor of German, gave me a mock interview, which was an immense help when I had to interview in New York.
“Heidi Thomann Tewarson, a professor of German who is also an advisor for my honors project, wrote one of my recommendations and also helped me with my statement. Ferd Protzman, assistant to Oberlin’s president, met with me before my interview to help me prepare and, in addition, put me in contact with international journalists working in Berlin and Munich. My friends here were also pretty tireless in their efforts to help me edit my application.”
Anne Posten, a senior German language and literature major, recently received Honorable Mention in the Susan Sontag Translation Competition. Posten earned this distinction for her translations of several poems by Albert Ostermeier, as well as several others by Thomas Brasch and Uwe Kolbe. Posten submitted translations of “To awaken with her” and “Sonnet without rhyme” by Uwe Kolbe in Diese Frau. Kolbe was the German department’s 39th Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence this past fall.
Posten was also judged on her translations of Ostermaier’s “first to fall” and “kissing disease,” from his book, Heartcore, and Thomas Brasch’s “When I Desire You Despite All Logic,” “And When We Are No Longer Here,” “How you like it,” “My Grandmother,” and “Sleeping Beauty and Pig Meat” from Wasich mir wuensche. Brasch’s poems were published in the English translation of Wasich mir wuensche (What I Wish for Myself: Poems Out of Love), which Posten and other German language and literature students undertook with Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Wild last spring.
