Dear ECLA,
This is to proudly share I graduated from Columbia this weekend. The ceremony was outstanding, with an inspiring speech by Kofi Annan. The speech is here.
I would like to thank you for my time at ECLA before Columbia. While I have undoubtedly learned a lot this year, it all fell in place onto the foundations that ECLA built. I swept through challenging assignments with a confidence that can only come after having done the kind of thinking that only ECLA can put you in the position to do.
I committed the usual sins of an ECLA graduate – I often found myself asking questions with the word “values” in them, persistently inquired about the ultimate goal, thought about social justice, and had the courage and eloquence to disagree when I didn’t see important considerations involved in a discussion.
It has been a long road, above all metaphorically, from when I first started at ECLA’s international summer university. I still remember talking to Thomas Norgaard about PY vs. AY and wondering what will come at the end of a semester dealing with Plato’s Republic. Somewhere along the way, I forgot about the journey’s destination. And this is when my real journey began…
It is not completed yet, and I am ready to embrace it as a life-long process. I am still not sure what exactly I will be doing after Columbia. I know I will be coming to Berlin and ECLA on Monday, and spending a week in Berlin. Over the last three years, a few apartments, rooms, street-addresses, cities and countries have been changed. But my spiritual home remains fixed at Platanenstrasse 24.
All the best from New York,
Snezhina Kovacheva (ISU’05, AY’09)