Junior Year in Freiburg

It has been almost 38 years since I set sail for Germany for my junior year abroad, and it has been almost 37 years since I returned to the US a wiser and much more interesting person. What happened to me?

• I jumped off another precipice on my life's road and I landed on my feet.
• I greatly enhanced my love affair with all people, places, and things foreign to that which I had already experienced.
• I learned a whole different approach to my country from a distance of 5,000 miles and became a true patriot.
• I perfected a second foreign language to a level that allowed me to read widely in that language and to incorporate what I absorbed into my person.

When I left the US at age 20, I took with me my by then well-established core values and my relatively limited life experience. By the time I returned 11 months later, having had more life experience than I could fit into multiple volumes, my values and my life experiences had coalesced; they had flowered into the adult I was to become. Not a day goes by that I don't remember where I came from. I came from a set of fine and loving parents and from my Junior Year in Munich (Freiburg). I am deeply grateful for both.

Since my experience through the Junior Year in Munich program was a defining moment in my life I decided that I wanted everyone to have an opportunity to experience the same thing. So I developed the Jean Berlowitz Endowed Study Abroad Fund for the Junior Year in Munich program through a gift from my estate plans.