#3 Babes Bolyai University

#3 Babes Bolyai University

Today we went on a tour of Babes Bolyai University which is where we have been staying.  The campus is somewhat like Rutgers because it is all over the city.  They say the city is the campus.  One of the first language term definitions we learned is that “faculti” in Romanian means “schools.”  We were all very confused at first about the meaning of this term.  First we went to the Babes Bolyai Museum of History.  We learned about how the college was founded and its history.  The name Babes Bolyai came to be from two universities merging together. One being Hungarian and one Romanian.  The museum had many old objects, papers and pictures. 

After the museum we went to the school of psychology.  This was very interesting because I received my bachelors in Psych.  We went into the laboratory where they had a virtual cube.  This cube (pictures posted) is for treating people mostly with anxiety disorders.  I was the first person that was able to try it out.  It was really cool and felt like I was in the video game Call of Duty.  So to me it looked like I was in a video game.  The lady that led the tour there was getting her Ph.D in psychology.  She also showed us that they had virtual helmets as well.  This was very interesting to me because I had read about this technology in treating PTSD within the military.  I tried asking her about the treatment of PTSD but she did not give me much of an answer unfortunately.  Sometimes I don’t if its a language barrier or they just do not treat PTSD very often.  She kept mentioning Agoraphobia and other phobias.

After sometime at the school of psychology we went to the school of social work.  We met with the director Maria Roth.  Mihai was also there, he is our guide/translator/organizer.  He pretty much does everything for us.  Mihai is a professor at Babes Bolyai school of social work and a friend to Becky.  What was interesting to me was that the school of social work building was a lot older than some of the other schools we had seen.  You would think it’d be a newer building because social work did not become a profession till around 25 years ago.  But maybe its in an older building because the profession is not as popular.  We asked a lot of questions to Maria Roth.  She answered them the best she could but she did seem too prepared.  She mentioned that this was supposed to be an informal meeting.  What she did talk a lot about was the adoption situation over the past years in Romania.  Her speciality is also in child abuse.  During communism (1965-1989) the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu wanted to increase the population.  He banned birth control and abortions.  The population grew and families were unable to care for all their children.  Ceausescu told them give your children to the state.  These children were put into institution/orphanages.  I will talk about this more later.  Anyway when the communism period ended, Romania opened up for international adoptions.  Many children were adopted from all over the world.  More specifically from the U.S. and Great Britain.  Now international adoption is closed, the Romanian government is trying to get the children back into their homes with their families. 

**I tried uploading a video of me in the cube but it would not work =(