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is good at Cosmopolitan Club. Cosmopolitan Club is home for me, my greatest party location and one of the most interesting places I have been in my life. First, I just want to introduce myself. My name is Felix Autenrieth I am a German/Canadian first year graduate student in chemistry, lived in Germany for most of my life and came first to Urbana-Champaign as an exchange student in the year 1999. At first glance U-C seemed not really exciting, a famous University in the middle of nowhere surrounded by corn fields. Compared to places I was before (Nice, France; Budapest, Hungary; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Vienna, Austria, Montreal, Canada, and several other places which you probably do not know) I was thinking U-C will probably not the most exciting one. I was pretty wrong with my opinion. In U-C I found the most various international and multicultural community compared to all the places I was before and this was just great. U-C has around 100 international groups and student associations, exchange programs with a lot of interesting universities all over the world, and a very vivid international university life. But this is only the organized stuff--the best thing here is the international people who like to party like me. The place where we have met each other was the Cosmopolitan Club on Thursday night coffee hours. We put each other on mailing lists where we have located all the parties on Friday and Saturday nights and met each other again on Sunday night for the international dinners at Cosmopolitan Club. This was a great life I had just to go back to Germany after the exchange was over. This was not very exciting and my time there I can describe with two words: I graduated. After graduation I applied here for the Ph.D. program, got in, and now live at the Cosmopolitan Club. Cosmopolitan Club is now also my home and I still love the coffee hours, the mailing lists, the international dinners, and all the newly arrived students who come to us in their first week in the United States. Even if they are very lonely in their first week on campus, they know that they will meet the same great people next Thursday at the coffee hour. Cosmopolitan Club as a home is living together with fourteen people from eleven different countries (just check out our homepage). Together we share our excitement about experiencing the world and have also a lot of fun as a group of students going out in U-C. As a resident at Cosmopolitan Club, you get also involved in the organization of all the international student events on campus. Last week I was, together with Diana Fernandez, MC (Master of Ceremony) at the 20th International Dinner. This event is the biggest international event at the University of Illinois, hosted by the University YMCA, the Cosmopolitan Club, and the Office of International Student Affairs every year. It was great to present food, performances, and lifestyles from all over the world to the University community. The Cosmopolitan Club motto is "Above All Nations is Humanity," and I hope that I can also contribute to this motto with my life at Cosmopolitan Club. For the future I hope that I can travel and see and experience all the great places in the world about which I have heard here at Cosmopolitan Club. |