Thanksgiving has always been an odd holiday to me. I spent my Thanksgivings, like most others, eating plenty of homemade food that only one’s own family can make correctly. The following days were hectic as I skipped Black Friday shopping to compete in dance competitions. Once I graduated high school and moved away from my dance studio, I knew my Thanksgiving weekends would change dramatically. I never expected to spend one of them I Switzerland though!

I have a secret alter-ego who emerges about as often as the world ends. This person is a model French student who notes down every new expression she hears and looks it up in the French-English dictionary when she gets home in the evening, and maybe even does a little bedtime reading of that dictionary just to notch up her vocabulary: a sort of digestif, you know.

I wish she would come around more often.

Thanksgiving is a very American holiday, and it is celebrated in a very predictable manner. Delicious smells in the house; family; football games (preferably with the volume turned down); and a familiar frenzy of energy. It served to cast my homecoming into an interesting light: normalcy.

“How does it feel to be home?” they’d ask.
“Normal,” I said, laughing, “freakishly normal.”

This past week marked the most uniquely American tradition that I’ll miss while in Spain—Thanksgiving.  Before I went abroad, I was determined to make every effort to assimilate to Spanish culture; I didn’t want to travel across an ocean to fall back into American patterns.  However, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to give up, for an extended period of time, virtually every tie I had to an American lifestyle (No football on tv?  No delivery pizza?  No Starbucks?).  Even my classmates who were determined to watch no TV in English until the end of 3 months have

Either someone is pulling a prank on me or I need to debunk an abroad myth. The myth has to do with a topic I haven’t emphasized much in my blog: academics. I’ll be honest: along with the rest of the study abroad population, I expected classes to be cake. Every abroad alumnus I’ve talked to has assured me that abroad classes are notorious for being easy so that you have time to travel and enjoy your surrounding culture. I heard that you might have finals, but don’t expect many papers, and definitely don’t expect to be overloaded with work all at once.

Over the course of the last three months, I’ve observed a number of esoteric idiosyncrasies of Italian social mores: such as, Italians love mojitos, music videos and hot dogs. Perhaps these impressions are slight over-generalizations; but, in whatever way, they seem pervasive enough to consider some-what norms.

When I arrived in Rome, the last thing that I thought I’d be doing was an internship. I thought I’d give the opportunity a chance, however, and I’m quite glad that I did. As I looked through my options at the beginning of the semester, one caught my eye: Ittec SRL. It’s a small firm that performs IT services for a variety of companies, and has a financial forecasting branch, Quantum Forecasting, that uses computer software to predict changing market values. With my Finance major and Computer Science minor, this was clearly a perfect fit, and, after a brief interview, my work began.

“The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong.  The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.”

I found this quote by author Dave E. Smalley to be the most accurate summation of my Study Abroad internship experience, and really, my internship experience as a whole.

I’m a terrible singer. I’ve been told countless times that it would be better if I just didn’t even try. So when I found out that one of my main responsibilities of my internship at the Montessori preschool would be singing in English, I was a bit distressed, to say the least. What if the kids hated my singing? What if I was so bad that they put their hands over their ears? Or worse, hated me and ran away?