Category Stories: Family Matters
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Navigating Relationships Abroad
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Navigating Relationships Abroad: Three Kinds of People You’ll Miss When you leave the country for three months, you take your life into account. Affairs must be put in order: bags packed, calls made, storage containers rented and filled. The practical takes precedence and you become objective in your choices, taking only what you need. Then…
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Home Base: Host Families in Santiago
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The emotions that accompany the idea of living with a family that’s not your own during your time abroad fall in the gray area between exhilarating and absolutely terrifying. You’ll find yourself experiencing the whole spectrum of these emotions; both before your time abroad and during it. But students in Santiago have navigated this challenge,…
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How To Overcome First Generation Hurdles While Studying Abroad
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Let me start by saying that I am a first-generation college student who grew up in poverty. I have also struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life. At one point, I started failing classes and had to drop out of college for a year and a half. Studying abroad has always been…
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Exploring My Mexican Identity in México: Part II
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“Cuando la ire a ver?” “When will I see her again?” my grandmother says with such despair as tears gather in her eyes. She’s holding my phone, looking at a photo of my mom. They haven’t seen each other, hugged each other, or held each other in 20 years. “No, creo que ya no la…
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My Homestay Experience Abroad
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Once I had become acquainted with my new Glasgow surroundings after a week, I traveled to Shap in northern England through my IFSA program to stay with a local family in what was called a homestay. Many of my friends in other countries live permanently with a local family for their semesters abroad and raved…
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How My Experiences with Chilean Culture Changed Me
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Unpacking My Amazing Experience I’ve thought and reflected on my time studying abroad since returning from Valparaiso, Chile My experience was nothing but learning, experiencing, and understanding — IFSA provided me with so many opportunities to grow as an individual and also with the local community, which is something that I will carry with me for…
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Retaining My Kazakh Identity While Studying Abroad
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Probably one of my biggest fears when going abroad to study in the US 3 years ago and again upon my arrival in UK was that I would not be able to stay true to my culture and values held by my people. Kazakhstan, being a country of only 17 million people, does not have…
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5 Tips for Staying Centered While Living Abroad
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One of the main intentions I set for 2019 was to find home in my body. I vowed to make ‘home’ a state of mind rather than a place. As I departed my loved ones and hometown on January 1st to study abroad in London for five months, I knew this hefty goal would be…
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Do’s and Don’ts of Study Abroad in Costa Rica
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As I finish up my semester here in Costa Rica, I’ve been taking more and more time to reflect upon the culture that I’ve integrated myself in through the IFSA Universidad Nacional Partnership. Costa Rica and studying abroad have their quirks, but you stop noticing them after a while. These differences became starker to me…
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You Are Stronger Than You Think: 5 Ways I Dealt with Grief While Abroad
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My biggest fear before heading to New Zealand was not being able to come home in case of an emergency because I would be about 8,000 miles away. Before going abroad, I had only ever lived about an hour away from my hometown. It was a far-fetched problem that remained in the back of my…
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