There’s a version of this introduction where I explain Munich as a purely logical choice: it’s a global city, it has a distinct legal and civic culture, studying abroad looks good on a law school application. All of that is true. But it’s also the less interesting truth.

I’m Emerson, a pre-law student at the University of Pittsburgh from Millersville, Maryland, graduating in Spring 2028. Through the Frederick Honors College, I’ll be spending this summer in Munich, and if I’m being honest, the decision started not with a program brochure but with a language class.

I went to Berlin before I ever set foot on Pitt’s campus. Berlin is a city that wears its history loudly, and even then, with limited language and no real framework for what I was experiencing, something about it stuck. When I got to Pitt and found the German department, it clicked into place. What started as intellectual curiosity turned into the kind of enthusiasm that makes you stay after class to keep talking. Berlin had planted something, and Pitt gave it room to grow.

Munich is a different proposition entirely. Where Berlin is jagged and self-aware, Munich has a reputation for being ordered, traditional, and quietly proud of it. I’m curious whether that reputation holds up from the inside, and what it feels like to move through a German city with a completely different personality than the one that first caught my attention.

What genuinely interests me goes beyond the tourist version of any of this. As someone headed toward a legal career, I find myself thinking constantly about the relationship between culture and institutions. How do Germans think about law, civic duty, and collective responsibility in ways that diverge from the American assumptions I’ve absorbed without realizing it? Spending a summer immersed in a new culture feels less like a detour from my path and more like an essential part of it.

I also expect to be humbled. Cultural fluency in one German city doesn’t automatically transfer to another, and a passion for a language is not the same thing as inhabiting it daily. I’m going in curious, a little nervous, and ready to be surprised.

If you’re a future FHC student weighing a summer in Germany, I hope this blog gives you something useful. And if you’re just along for the ride, willkommen. Let’s see what Munich has to say.

Bis bald.