Search results for: “summer”
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From Aloha to Kia Ora
Long before I set foot in New Zealand, while I was still waiting to hear back from IFSA and conducting preliminary research on the place where I would soon spend five months studying and exploring, I assumed that New Zealand would be very similar to my home in Hawaii. Afterall, how different could this Pacific…
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ROTC: Future Officers and Studying Abroad
Chris Reardon, a Virginia native participating in ROTC through the Marine Corps, and Lauren Lohmiller, an upstate New Yorker in Army ROTC, are both studying abroad in Shanghai, China this semester. They are both seniors at Norwich University, the United States’s oldest private military college, and both are majoring in Chinese. Coincidentally, they are also…
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The Only Thing You Need to Pack When Studying Abroad
Packing can be Challenging Before leaving for my semester abroad, I had no clue what to pack.Do I bring my pillow? What about my kavu? Am I going to need my favorite book? Should I take three or four pairs of shoes?The day I arrived in Cardiff, Wales, I honestly didn’t know what I had ended…
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How to Survive & Thrive Until Study Abroad Really Begins
My journey into study abroad was filled with many emotional highs and lows. It was like a novel; it had a beginning, middle and end. Everyone talked about the beginning and end, but where was the middle, the heart of the story? No one ever mentioned it, that time between acceptance and actually being abroad.Everyone…
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A Routine Abroad: The Lessons I Learned from a Busy Schedule in New Zealand
When you begin to think about going abroad, anybody who has spent time studying in another country will tell you that it was the best semester/year of their college career. They tell you about the people they met, the classes they took and the things they saw. Just by talking to them, you can tell…
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How to Play Pick Up Like a Porteño
I wasn’t in Buenos Aires 24 hours before I was being stared in the face by a massive plate of french fries covered in melted cheddar and bacon. In the back of my head, I heard the faint beeping of the YoYo Intermittent Recovery Test (a common fitness test used to test athletes on their…
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Study Abroad as a Married Student
There are many reasons why I chose to study abroad in Lima, Peru, during the spring 2016 semester, but the dominant motivation was the choice to marry my husband, who is from Peru.I always get mixed reactions when I tell people that I got married at the beginning of my study abroad program with IFSA-Butler,…
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Loving the Irish Language
Dia dhaoibh! An bhfuil an Ghaeilge agaibh? San ollscoil nó ag spaisteoireacht, you’re bound to encounter the Irish language one way or another, and it can come as a bit of a surprise. It’s sometimes a point of confusion; many people outside of Ireland may not even be aware that…
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How Does a First-Generation, Non-Traditional Student Study Abroad?
My Story My parents did not attend college, and I was not really expected to attend either. My family also does not travel, and international travel was always a far-off fantasy for me. I never really expected for it to be possible for me to go anywhere; it was just something I daydreamed about from…
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What the Food in Buenos Aires Taught Me About My Latina Identity
As a person of Mexican descent living in the United States, I also identify as being a Latina. To be quite honest, I didn’t even know that the term “Latino” or “Latina” existed until about the third grade when I started taking standardized tests that asked me to bubble in my ethnic identity. At the…
