I want to come home

That is pretty much how I feel about 75% of the time, and this is really just a post to complain about WHY my experience studying here has been awful.

Everything boils down to one class, one professor.
A women's history class, with a female professor, who I have no doubt is extremely intelligent on the subject and has studied women's history in Germany for many years.
However, in the last month, it has become apparent from my perspective that she is either extremely proud of her accomplishments to the point of being condescending to her students, or she despises students, or a mixture of both.

This class was formatted as a Proseminar, which seems to mean that each student takes a turn giving a presentation of approximately 30 minutes in length, and depending on how many people, there may be up to 3 in a row on a particular class session. The professor's job is for the most part to correct the presenter, add comments that he or she may have left out, and even heavily criticize what the presenter did poorly or could do better.
This specific class focused on the carrers/jobs of women in German history. My assigned topic was "Fuersorgerinnen" aka Social Workers.

Along with the presentation, we were all required to write a 15 to 20 page term paper to be turned in by the end of August.

Given that I wanted/needed my grades before I leave Germany on the 13th of August, I had briefly discussed with my professor that I would need to turn in my paper early, and she said that would be fine.
The semester started in the 2nd week of April, and my presentation was June 13th.
This meant that from the end of April through all of May and through the beginning of June I spend nearly every weekend, as well as 3 hours per day reading books in German about the topic of women as social workers in Germany in the early 20th century.
I had never taken a modern European history class, and for that matter, the last modern history class I took was in my junior year of high school. I'm a scientist, we don't usually study this kinds of history topics. At Purdue, science students are required to take 2 consecutive and 1 stand alone liberal arts classes that could be simple history classes as such, but because I am much more interested in older history, I took one Medieval studies class, and counted 2 of my German literature classes and my consecutive ones (German lit I, covering faust, Goethe, and some post-modernist works, and Germen Lit II convering Medieval stories). As embarrassing as it is, I knew absolutely nothing about when the women's movement began in Europe, or when social work foundations were established. (I can however tell you all about what clothing and style was like for women in the 16th-18th century, which comes in part from visiting castle clothing museums and taking tours)

And so I spent (I would very much like to say "wasted") hours and hours researching. In German. Which, I would like to clarify takes me twice as long to read. There are so many theme specific words that I was unfamiliar with, and had to stop and look up and write down so I wouldn't forget. How often do you think I have a conversation in German about the "rate of infant deaths" or "war-related social workers"?

So June 13th came, and I felt ready for my presentation. I had notecards and had practiced as much as I could afford,(given I had another term paper which required just as much research). I gave my presentation, and to my surprised, my professor had no negative comments, no suggestions, and I took that as a really great sign. She even told me that she could understand me fine and she thought I did a good job.  YAYYY!!!! ...or so I thought.

Since my presentation went so smoothly, I decided to basically follow that format for my paper. But, I wanted to beef it up somewhat, because I wasn't sure if I  could write 15 pages just from a 20 minute speech. So I continued reading my library books, sacrificing weekends I could be using to travel through Germany, taking in the culture and beautiful cities. I had planned to turn in my paper around August 1st, think that that would be enough time to get my grade by August 12th. Additionally, the last class was scheduled to be on July 18th, and so I thought to myself: Ok, that's perfect, I will give my self the research due date of July 18th, and then I will take two weeks to write my paper, and have it proof read by a German friend before submitting it to my professor.

THEN came July 4th. It was a normal Thursday class session. I don't remember what the day's presentation was about, but as always I only understand about 60% of what is being said, because each presenter has a slightly different accent or way of speaking, and when someone uses a lot of technical words or research related jargon in German, it is hard for me to follow. But as always, I paid attention and tried my best. Not a big deal.
At the end of class, my professor came over to me and asked again when I needed my grade by. I replied August 12th, since I will be leaving on the 13th.
After a moment's hesitation she said: ok, then turn it in by about July 13th.
I didn't know what to say. In about 3 seconds, in my head I thought. WHAT? She needs an entire MONTH to grade it?! What if my other professors say that too?! ...Wait a minute, today is already the 4th! July 13th is only like a week away!!!!! I'm not even done with my research! I have to write an entire paper in a week?!
 But all I said was "oh...umm. Ok I will try my best" (in German)
To which she responded "yes, ok...And have someone proof read it, because if there are mistakes I will take off points"
 I thought at the time that that was pretty rude, because obviously I had figured that I would have a German read my paper, and naturally turning in a paper with mistakes calls for having some points removed from the overall grade.

So I was slightly panicked, but I was determined not to disappoint my professor.
I finished as much reading as I could the following Friday and Saturday, and Sunday afternoon, 10 hours on Monday and from about 2:30pm to 11:30pm on Tuesday sitting at my computer compiling all my notes into an 18 page term paper in German about the history of women social workers in German, in the 19th and 20th centuries. After proof reading to the best of my abilities at that point, I emailed it to a German friend of mine (who I still owe a few drinks to now) so that she could proof read it fully for me.

A couple days later she sent it back to me, filled with comments, and with incorrect grammatical elements crossed out in red and rewritten next to it, or with suggestions on how to rewrite it. I was so immensely thankful, and also embarrassed that my paper looked so horrible. She told me that she spent about 8 hours reading it. I was so relieved, made all the corrects (which took me about 2 hours) and emailed it to my professor on the morning of Saturday July 14th [after emailing her on the afternoon of the  13th and asking if she would take an email copy or would prefer I wait until Monday to turn in a hard copy, to which she promptly replied that an email version would be fine.]
I was satisfied with my hard work, and extremely glad to be done and have stuck to the short notice time frame quite well.
 Until I noticed she had written back that she would be going on vacation for a week or 2 and that the correction process could take until the 27th of August.

Once more I was back to freaking out. I rushed to finish my paper in a week, so that she could give my a grade before I left, and now she was telling me she wouldn't be able to after all?! Naturally I emailed her back expressing how important it is for me to get my grade quickly because I am graduating basically as soon as I get back to PU, blah blah blah...

Fastforward to Monday night July 23rd. I still hadn't heard anything from my professor about how the grading was going, but since I had now 2 other term papers to work on, I pushed it from my mind. I was workin all day Monday on my ancient Olympia paper when suddenly ALL of my documents were just gone. Deleted. Poof. EVERYTHING. (you can read about that depressing event in a previous post I wrote).  Soooo that was just horrible.

To make everything worse, my professor emailed me Tuesday afternoon saying "You must have sent me the wrong file, this paper is full of errors...." I was completely shocked, and super embarrassed that I had sent her the original unedited paper, or even the one with Biddy's correction on it. So I wrote a super apologetic email back to her, saying I would look everything over and send the corrected version as soon as I could. (keep in mind I didn't have ANYTHING from my own computer, and everything that I was doing at this point was in a computer lab, so thankfully I still had a copy in my email I had sent her.)
But to my further shock and this time devastation, the version that I sent her WAS the corrected copy! I didn't know what to say. I immediately contacted Biddy asking her what to do, and she briefly looked over the first couple pages, and pointed out that here and there I forgot to delete a comma, or in a few words I forgot to change an ae to an umlaut. 
 So I spend 3 extra hours in a computer lab meticulously correcting all the very tiny errors that I could find-- many of which I could only find by lining up Biddy's corrected version next to the version I had corrected and line by line looking at every word and space to find any error.

But by midnight I was finally done, I did a final read through and sent it to my professor (not like my read though was going to do anything at that point. It's not like I would find any sentences that I thought could be rewritten to sound more eloquent). As Biddy had already explained to me, it's possible that my professor was expected to grade my paper as any other of her students, meaning she expects a very formal writing style of a university student studying history, despite knowing that I am an international native-English speaking student. My writing, though good for my classification, is likely only at best that of a 6th grader. Biddy told me that she technically could change my sentences to sound better, but that would mean rewriting the ENTIRE paper. Not only is that basically plagiarism, but I could never ask a friend to spend that much time on something that she is not getting anything out of (no grade, no credit, no thanks or acknowledgement from the professor).

I also sent an explaination in English to my professor. I have a feeling she does not speak much English, but at least I tried. I wanted to explain my feelings in depth, in a way  I can't express the situation in German.

And then I waited.

3 days...1 week...1 1/2 weeks ....2weeks

It took her 2 weeks to get back to me. That was this past Tuesday- August 6th. I was in Passau and Muechen at the time, trying to get some enjoyment out of my time here finally (it was actually lovely-I'll blog about it soon to try to forget about this mess) so I only just found the email on Wednesday night, the 7th.

Guess what it said. No really go ahead.  What would a nice professor say, versus what would a completely picky, unsympathetic professor respond with?
...
a) She told me my paper was still full of errors.
b) she told me that she had warned me to get my paper thoroughly corrected by a native German and that my paper shows that I had decided otherwise. She even took an example sentence from my paper, which I will agree from out of context doesn't make much sense/ sounds irrelevant.
c) For the FIRST time, she mentioned that the content is lacking, and that the ENTIRE paper needs to be reworked
d) She also said the punctuation is wrong. ???
e) She said she can't give me any sort of assessment for my work because she will not accept it like this.
f) She had the attitude (that may be a harsh word, but that's how it is in my eyes) so state that the original due date for my grade, of August 13th would clearly be impossible to follow.

I think what she really meant when she said to have someone thoroughly correct my paper, is "write in English, then pay a professional translator to write it in German."

I know that my writing is not always excellent. I'm a math major. I write numbers and proofs and sciency boring things. I'm good at that. But writing history is not my forte. But even the harshest graders in college course have never given be below a B- on any written assignment.

Which is why it is so difficult for me to understand what I have possibly done to make this professor this unforgiving, this angry at me, and what I could possibly do to improve everything that I have worked so hard on this semester.

I have agonized so much over this that I woke up and immediately started thinking about the last email my professor sent me, to the point where I am shaking and developed a fever.
It's really unpleasant to say the least.

The kicker is that without getting any grade, meaning without the credits or class name showing up at all on my transcript at Purdue, I will have 11 credits for the semester. Without a study abroad, I only needed 4 to graduate, but a Study Abroad must count for 12 credits. If I don't come back with proof of having taken 12 credit hours, it's is my understanding that the study abroad office with revoke all of my scholarships that they have awarded me.
If (and I am REALLY hoping for this) they let it go, and finally aknowledge my situation, and decide to let me graduate and whatnot, part of my contract for accepting my scholarships states that I will promote this program to a group of students (give a presentation about study abroad to a class at PU). What the hell am I supposed to say???

I like Stuttgart. I made so many amazing friends here. I think my travels through other parts of Germany are wonderful. ...But do NOT study here. Yes, all of my other classes have gone well (equally as much work, but with sympathetic, lenient professors) but all it takes is one like this, and it will make you regret ever leaving your home university.

How's that for a pep-talk, Study Abroad office?

Visit Europe. I say VISIT, but for the love of everything, don't study there and expect to have an all around enjoyable experience. And don't take a women's history class if you value happiness and sanity.