14 days and 16 hours before I’m in Nice. 

41 items on my Notes app to-do list. 

A combined 102 hours spent in the last 3 months reading “My UNFORGETTABLE Study Abroad Experience” posts on Reddit. 

The anticipation is so real. 

I still remember the day I decided to study abroad. 

IES Abroad has a fool-proof plan for everyone to get their visas to study abroad. Documents are submitted, reviewed, and eventually sent to the consulate for approval through ACCESS. If anything goes wrong, IES Abroad is instantly notified, and the problem is handled before any stress can reach the student. It's an easy and secure process... if you live in America. 

See, I don't live in the U.S., and my visa process was a disaster. 

I’m sitting on a bed staring at my closet, willing the appropriate clothes to jump off the hangers and neatly arrange themselves in my open suitcase. 

I’m a little under two weeks from departure to Berlin, Germany, where I will spend the next year studying through IES Abroad. I’ve been dreaming of living in Berlin since I was 16, and yet I feel like all those dreams may well be thwarted by my wardrobe.

It’s no secret that I really have too many clothes and it’s painfully obvious that I won’t need all these in Berlin so what should I bring? 

It feels a bit surreal that I’ll be in Buenos Aires in less than a month. I’ve been so caught up in the paperwork of it all—sending in my visa application, buying plane tickets, making sure I have all of my forms filled out—that leaving has felt like a distant goal until recently. I got a call this morning from the Argentine consulate about my visa, and the man on the other end of the phone launched into a series of questions in Spanish almost immediately after I picked up. A few questions in, he asked what I knew about Argentina.