In this guest post, professor Öztürk guides us through the live music venues in Athens. From hard-rock to traditional rebetiko and everything else in between, the Athens music scene has something for everyone:

It is a pleasure to welcome 3 new MediaLab interns for Spring ’19: Caroline Farrell, Barbara Kasomenakis and Anna Vargas! They will be sharing their thoughts and experiences of studying abroad in weekly blog posts, starting this week. But first, the trio would like to introduce themselves:

The Spring ’19 semester at CYA kicked off with a flurry of informative, practical, and fun activities. 134 students from more than 60 universities across the U.S. participated in a week-long orientation program specially designed to welcome them to both CYA and Greece.
From survival modern Greek lessons and academic and acculturation support activities, to taverna dinners and a trip to the legendary ancient site of Delphi, the first week at CYA was bound to leave lasting memories to all incoming CYAers.

Below are just a few of the highlights of the week’s events:

Another successful CYA winter intersession course, the Voula Field School, came to an end last week. Twenty-nine students with a serious interest in archaeology spent three weeks of January 2019 participating in the excavation of a site associated with Aixonidai Halai under the supervision of CYA professors Yiannis Karavas and Angelos Papadopoulos. The excavation is directed by archaeologist Eftychia Lygouri and her colleagues Maria Giamalidi and Anna Maria Anagnostopoulou of the Piraeus Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities.

CYA has been named GoAbroad’s Top Rated Study Abroad Program of 2018, based exclusively on students’ evaluations! The ranking results from more than 35,000 students reviews on GoAbroad, a leading platform dedicated to the field of international education.

Thank you to all recent CYA alumni who evaluated us and shared their thoughts on the GoAbroad page. Here are some of their comments:

For anyone interested in Classics, Athens is a gold mine of opportunities for exposure to antiquity. Here, one can get a real sense of classical Greece and observe its monuments up close. Some students, however, choose to do a little more than just observing.

Throughout last semester, CYA student Matthew Sickinger spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings doing volunteer work at the Athens Agora, located beneath the northwest slope of the Acropolis. [The “Agora” in ancient Greek cities was a public space that acted as the central meeting point for all athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life in the city.] This is an one-of-a-kind opportunity that Nadia Meliniotis, our Executive Director of Student Affairs, has managed to secure for him.