London

In my experience, there’s a lot of pressure that comes with remembering your semester abroad. Whether it be collecting memorabilia, taking pictures and videos, or finding new creative ways to document your experience, students have various strategies they use to capture these special few months.

I’ve been back in the U.S. for about a week now. I think people underestimate how much your mental and physical health is impacted by the transition you experience when coming home from study abroad. Even though it makes sense to think that your transition when moving to a country outside of the U.S. would be more difficult than coming back, that is far from the truth, at least in my case.

When you’re living somewhere for an extended period of time, you start to take certain places for granted. Since the end of my program, I’ve found myself missing some of the places that made London feel like home to me. If you haven’t been to London before, you may not know how big of a city it actually is. There’s so many different areas that have completely different vibes, so it feels like there's unlimited places to discover and appreciate.

I’m writing this post from the plane ride home. In some ways I feel a lot of relief about returning to Pennsylvania and seeing my family and friends in State College. On the other hand, I also feel so incredibly anxious. I feel like I just lived a life that wasn’t real for 5 months, and now I’m waking up from what felt like a dream.

Now that we’re almost done with the semester, most of us study abroad students have started to face the reality of our final papers and assignments. At least for the IES Abroad Study London program, school is structured much differently than what it’s like at Penn State and other universities back in the United States. During a normal semester I’m used to constantly producing work, but usually on a smaller scale.