In all honesty, the biggest challenge I have faced overall is definitely balancing fun and school-work/motivating myself to do my schoolwork. When you’re in a brand new place, there are so many things to do and places to go it’s all so exciting. Added on top of that is the fact that we’re only there for such a short period of time in the grand scheme of being in an entire new country. It feels like you have to be making the most of every single second  in order to get the best experience possible and do all the things you can possibly squeeze in. This led my and my friends to taking a lot of weekend trips around the country to various different places. But then, since we were gone and not in Sydney on a lot of weekends, we wanted to explore around Sydney and go to new places within our city during the week while we were there. It made time management between exploring and doing school work very difficult. The best way that we found to get around this was to set aside times that we would all do our work. That way, nobody felt like they were missing out on getting to go see somewhere new since we were all doing our work together. We acknowledged the fact that the real reason we were there was for our school and knew that we definitely had to take care of the responsibilities that come with it first and foremost.  We definitely all learned from this challenge. I would say the biggest thing we learned is just prioritization and if we don’t have much due one week, carve out more time to travel and vise versa if we did have a lot of work that was due that week. 

I do think that other people studying abroad will encounter this same challenge. It’s only natural being in an exciting new place. My best advice to give them is just that you’re not alone in this! Everyone else you are there with is definitely experiencing this same struggle in some capacity. The best thing to do is overcome it together. Plan out in advance when you’re going to travel and when you’re going to focus more on work. But, also, not every hour of traveling and studying has to be planned out. If you end up having extra time one week because of a light workload, go explore somewhere! If you have enough time, let yourself go on a longer trip, maybe even a new country depending on where you’re studying. Even if you only have an hour to spare, go on a walk to a new place in your city! There’s always new places to see.