It is unavoidable to run into challenges that force you to change the way you function in the environment and the way that you think about things when you are in an unfamiliar situation. In my own experience of studying in Washington, D.C. and Brussels, Belgium this May, the toughest obstacle that challenged me was adjusting to new, large scale city environments. This was especially true abroad, where I for the first time had to almost exclusively use my French skills to get around, communicate, and even get myself out of sticky situations (let’s not mention the time I had to explain to busy bankers at 9 in the morning that my debit card got stuck in their ATM the day prior 😳).
Jokes aside, I think the biggest resources that enabled me to figure out these new challenges were my fellow classmates on the trip. We all were struggling to an extent to navigate and understand these new spaces, and so not only did we bond over these shared experiences, but we also frequently worked as a team to figure things out, since we always all had some unique advice or knowledge to bring to a situation at hand.
Though life in D.C. and Brussels is not so far off from the other busy metropolises of American cities, I do think the nature of my program greatly impacted my daily routines. For one, we often woke up very early in order to be able to head to our site visits which would go on usually for most of the day until dinner time. In this way, it was more like a 9-5 day of instruction as opposed to what a typical day in class during the school year would look like for me. Of course, my friends and I always wanted to still have time to explore and have fun, so we naturally tried to experience all we could while on our program every evening. Though I was definitely exhausted after these longer days, I would not have changed anything because I can truly say I made the most of my time and created some great memories.
It is so hard for me to pick out my number one, favorite moment of the trip, but I think some of the highlights were when my friends and I on a whim bought train tickets to travel to Lille, France and Bruges, Belgium for a weekend. If it already wasn’t challenging enough navigating a new city for the first time, we really put ourselves in the throes of trying to figure out the trains by ourselves! Of course though, everything worked out in the end and we got to do some things that I would have never imagined, such as riding on a canal tour together in Bruges or enjoying French foods authentically in France. If there’s one thing I learned from these experiences, it is to not be afraid to take risks and to fully jump into and embrace everything that challenges you.
