My Semester Recap: Highs and Lows

I returned back to the U.S. just over a week ago. With a little bit of distance from my semester abroad, here’s my recap! I want to break down the semester into highs and lows (more tough moments than lows).

Highs:

• Friends
  • People that study abroad are (in my experience) adventurous, adaptable, and enjoy life! So, I loved the people that I met through my program. Of the 20 of us, we came from all across the U.S. and three other countries. Though we were a diverse set of personalities, our adventures brought us together and I learned a lot about myself through them.
• Travel & SO MANY NEW PLACES
  • An obvious one. I visited: the Amazon Rainforest, 8? different islands in the Galápagos, the cloud forest, the paramo, volcanoes both in the mainland and Galápagos, & more. Better travel than I could have asked for or ever expected. Almost all of those trips were FOR CLASS.
• Personal Growth
  • After a semester full of new experiences, lots of fun, plenty of embarrassment, learning about a different culture, doing daily life in a new language.. I am a fuller, more confident version of myself. It's reaffirming to be dropped into a different way of life and enjoy it. Post-abroad, I feel comforted by the fact that I'm adaptable and have gotten much better at finding fun in a variety of situations. 

Tough parts:

• Adapting to two different host families
  • It was difficult to adapt to a new family dynamic halfway through the semester. I grew to feel comfortable and happy with both families, but there are bumps in any relationship like that. Culturally, the two locations are quite different, too. In the Galápagos, gender dynamics are closer to machismo and conservative relations, which was unfamiliar to me.
• Budgeting time & preventing burnout
  • The pressure of doing everything or always being occupied can become exhausting while abroad. I often leaned more towards being busy always. It's important to remember how your social battery typically is and observe how it changes abroad. In the Galápagos, a quiet beach day on Sundays often was the perfect reset for me. The semester is long, and FOMO gets easier if you remind yourself that you might just be too tired to properly enjoy something.
• Goodbye/ending
  • I'm not a crier, but I cried at the end of the program and it was a pretty heavy travel day. Slowly saying goodbye is just tiring and never fun. I had to embrace the sadness of goodbye and focus on how beautiful it is that I got to know such incredible people and places. Coming home for the holidays helped to give me something to pivot towards. And, now I have people to visit all around the country and across the world!

Of course, the highlights far outweighed any challenges. And, though it's cliche, the challenges pushed me to grow. 

So, that's all from me. Seriously, go to Ecuador. It is a beautiful country both environmentally and with the people. Thank you to the IES Abroad staff in Quito and the Galapagos for their continued support this semester!