Holiday Availability: All IES Abroad offices will be closed on Dec 24, Dec 25, Dec 31, and Jan 1 as we take some time to celebrate. During the weeks of 12/22 and 12/29, our team will be smaller, so responses may take longer than usual. Thanks for your understanding—and happy holidays!
I am off to Spain in less than 24 hours and I am hopeful, expectant, and giddy for all that this semester will hold. My journey to studying abroad in Spain has not been a short or easy one, and I feel it is paramount for me to share a glimpse of it with you for you to get to know me. I have had a desire to study abroad in Spain since I first visited the country during the summer before my senior year of high school in 2017.
School. School taught in another language. School taught in another language in a foreign country. What even is study abroad? This a question that has been stuck in my thoughts as my departure slowly creeps closer…As of writing this piece, there’s 32 hours 11 minutes and 30 seconds—now 29 seconds—before I’m flying halfway around the world for study abroad. This has always been on my bucket list, and now I’m finally going to check this one off.
It’s currently a sunny Saturday afternoon here in the Galápagos and I am basking in the absolutely absurdly, beautiful reality that I will be living on San Cristobal for three months. In the two weeks that I have been here, I have been able to swim, surf, play pickup soccer, take salsa lessons, hike in the highlands, snorkel with sea turtles, eat delicious empanadas, home in on my ArcGIS skills, and share beach sunsets with friendly sea lions.
Tomorrow morning I leave for Milan to start my IES Abroad experience, an experience that I have almost no expectations for. Don't get me wrong, I've been waiting to head to Italy since the day I was admitted to the program, but I've been cautiously curbing my ideas of what might happen while abroad.
I have had a summer.
*Zip, click, thud!*
That's the sound of my luggage closing. It's all packed and ready to go for my trip. There's only one thing...I don't even leave for another three weeks. I race down the stairs to tell my dad, "I did it, I'm all packed and ready to go." The reaction I see on his face is amusement. "I don't know anyone else who packs this early," he says. I walk back upstairs and lean back on my bed.
When I was five years old, my older sister helped me make a paper chain to count down to the first day of kindergarten. We must have gotten the idea from an arts and crafts magazine and dug through our box of art supplies to come up with the scissors, tape, and stacks of colorful construction paper. After completing the strand of dozens of interlocked paper loops, we hung it from the hanging potted plant in the kitchen. Each morning as I wandered into the kitchen, I would rip off one paper loop.
Mixing COVID with personal circumstances has made preparing for studying abroad in France not easy whatsoever. A rollercoaster shifting through endless anxiety, confusion, fear, hope, and excitement. Every step either felt like one foot forward or one foot back.
