Christopher Schilling

Semester

Moravian College

My conversation partner, Yuuko, is as nice as they come. In fact, I was able to meet up with when I came back to Japan for a short research program. The fact that JCMU had such a program available was awesome on all counts.

While visiting Matsumoto up north for our weekend trip, a group of us happened upon a restaurant owner of Nawate Doori, a local street filled with small shops and eateries owned by local residents. The owner told us, sadly, that Nawate Doori was to be demolished to build a new residential building! The four of us signed a petition to protest the decision. We had an excellent meal with him.

He also told of us a past foreign visitor who gave him a harmonica, which the owner played extremely well. He asked me to sing a "traditional" song from the U.S., so I nervously sang a few bars from Don McClean's "American Pie."

Japanese class was excellent, and has served me well since then. I miss Aizawa-sensei and Kitasaka-sensei so bad!

Good times all around.

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CJSchilling@gmail.com

I finished undergrad at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA in May of 2008. While there, I started getting interested in memory research (though my interest was really more about forgetting than it is about remembering stuff). I also began dating Aubrey in November 2007.

I then worked at Temple University with Nora Newcombe as a research assistant for about a year, where I discovered the deliciousness of lunch trucks in Philadelphia. During that time, Aubrey and I were officially engaged in January of 2009.

I was accepted into a graduate program at Univ. of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and have been doing research with Ben Storm (coolest name ever) since Fall 2009. In Summer 2010, I received a grant from JSPS and NSF to conduct research at Nagoya University over the course of about 10 weeks. There, I worked with Jun Kawaguchi doing memory lab experiments.

Aubrey and I have planned our wedding for December 16th, 2010 in Bethelehem, PA.

While four months was surely not enough to make Japan easy for me to explain or understand in its entirety, it sure was enough for me to want to come back.