Attended the 2016 Accademia Vivarium Novum Summer School in Rome as part of the Classics Undergraduate Travel Award.
"The summer of 2016 I spent taking an immersive course in Latin and a supplementary course in Ancient Greek at the Accademia Vivarium Novum was a unique and, for me, very enriching experience. The philosophy, that these “dead” languages can only truly be comprehended if we learn to speak and write as the ancient authors did, completely changed my perspective on Classical literature. From learning the basics on day one, such as identifying Rome on a map in Latin, we slowly learned to internalize the vocabulary and rules of grammar to actively speak the language. I was pleasantly surprised by how the immersive nature of the academy helped me deepen my knowledge. We spoke Latin in our Latin classes (and Greek in our Greek classes). We dined in Latin, we played soccer in Latin, we joked and laughed only in Latin! (There was of course some humor in Greek, mainly around the idea of βίος being χαλεπός.) We took personal ownership of a language that had been spoken ages ago, so that when we came to read Ovid and Catullus and other authors, we were able to connect to them with an immediacy that I doubt otherwise would have been possible. We were able, as a famous philologist once said, to make the ancients speak by feeding them with our own blood. Even now, snippets of songs we sung or passages we read continue pop back into my head and remind me of the time when my relationship with the Classics had been so profoundly changed."