For my CIP I participated in Kyoto University’s Choir! Every week we meet twice a week usually from 6:00-8:30 PM. In this period a usual practice consists of the first 45 minutes being like a workout and vocal warmups. Then we split into groups depending on our vocal part for around 30 minutes. This time allows us to practice our parts, especially the difficult sections everyone struggles with. Following this we will all come together and practice the parts we were working on to hear our hard work come to fruition! This experience has been overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t recommend it enough! It was difficult at first because I truly could not grasp what the students were saying. After all, they utilized a colloquial version of Japanese more known as informal forms which I have barely studied. But after I continued to work on it and listen to what they were saying, I feel as though my Japanese has slowly improved just from this fact alone! It was sometimes difficult because the practices were so late at night and our Japanese classes are early in the morning, but I am glad I have continued going! It is such a refreshing feeling because I feel as though everyone in the choir is truly happy to have me in the choir and looks forward to working with me ! After choir practice as well, most of the students, all go to this restaurant very close to where we practice! This allows us to have some delicious food while also allowing us to develop our one-on-one relationships with everyone in the choir ! It’s always so interesting talking to everyone, seeing where they came from, and what they want to study. My advice to someone wanting to join the choir, I recommend that you have prior choir experience because that will help alleviate any basic problems that could occur. Also, I recommend being able to read basic kanji and hiragana pretty fast. That way when you first start the songs, you are not taking an extra amount of time just simply trying to memorize what to say with what notes.