Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, 2015-2016
Jonas Richter was the FLTA (Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant) at Sonoma State University for Fall 2015 and Spring 2016. He studied English and Social Science with a focus on Political Science at Bergische Universität Wuppertal with the goal of becoming a high school teacher. He grew up in a little town called Nossen, located between Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony, East Germany. During his tenure at SSU, Jonas organized the biweekly German Film Series, Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. in 1028 Stevenson, showing films in German, with English subtitles. He hosted the weekly „Kaffeestunde“ on Tuesdays from noon to one at Charlie Brown’s. He coordinated many events and field trip, and worked together with the SSU German Club to organize meetings and activities.
On May 3, 2016, Jonas Richter presented his final talk at SSU, "The European Union in World Politics." View the full PowerPoint Presentation and Critical Essay below.
A student at the University of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia Germany, Jonas was awarded an FLTA-Program grant to serve as a teaching assistant in the German program and take courses here at Sonoma State. He has been sharing his language and culture with SSU students to inspire them to travel and study overseas, and help them better prepare to engage with universities, businesses and organizations abroad. Jonas is one of fourteen FLTAs from Germany in the United States, and the only one on the West Coast.
German Language Teaching Assistants, 2019-2020
Anne Frohn was a Language Teaching Assistant at SSU. She studied to become an elementary school teacher in Freiburg, a small town in the southwest of Germany, where her major subjects were English and Protestant Theolog,y and with the intention to also teach German and Mathematics.
She said: "I decided to study a year abroad because I want to get to know American culture, especially the American school system, and I am really looking forward to meeting a lot of new and interesting people and their cultures as well as making you more familiar with the German language and culture. I am sure that this cultural exchange is a very important experience for everyone in our present world which is becoming more and more globalized and multicultural. In my freetime I enjoy traveling (Sri Lanka, Israel, and South Africa are some of my last travel destinations), reading, singing and being outside.
Lara Damm participated as a Language Teaching Assistant as SSU from fall 2015 to spring 2016. She was studying to become an elementary teacher at the University of Education in Freiburg. At the time, she had taught children through an internship in Germany, but her experience at SSU allowed her to teach students at the university level.