When asked why I return to teach the International Summer School at the University of Oslo, every summer for so many years, I thought of three different reasons why one might stay in the same job for a long period time: you might be lazy, you might be stupid, or there might be something to it.
As another year comes to its end and we symbolically wait for new beginnings, I reflect on how we humans deal with transitions and change.
Time flies. It is already December, and we have now opened our application portal for the International Summer School 2017.
The online application portal opened on 1 December, and we are now ready to receive applications for the ISS 2016. Our catalog has been distributed widely around the world, and it is also available on our website. I hope you find it easy to navigate, and that you find exciting courses that appeal to you and motivate you to apply.
When I tell people that I work at the Summer School, they sometimes wonder what I and my colleagues do the rest of the year. One would think we could do as the bears in the deep Norwegian forests: creep into our dens and hibernate till next summer. It is not, however, as simple as that.
The ISS is anchored in a deeply rooted belief in the value of every human being, no matter what his or her background is, and every member of the ISS community, student, faculty or staff, should let it constantly be reflected in the way they treat and talk about each other.
Rafe Jabari was invited as a special guest, representing alumni students, for the opening of the 70th session of the ISS. He was an ISS student in 1998, and came as member of a group called Shalom-Salam, a confidence building project for Palestinian and Israeli students. At the opening ceremony he was interviewed by me.
”April is the cruellest month”, the English poet T.S. Eliot writes in his poem The Waste Land. I am inclined to agree with him. Over the past couple of weeks we have had bright spring sunshine, heavy rain and even snow and hail here in Oslo. So at least, the weather seems cruel. But now May is just around the corner, summer is drawing steadily closer and we are looking ahead to hopefully more predictable and warmer weather. And what is more, we are looking forward to the summer session, now only eight weeks away.
As I am writing to you now, we are in the middle of the admissions process. The ISS has received a total of 4061 applications so far for the 2016 session; 3503 of these are applications for scholarships.
