The Summer I Studied Abroad

This summer I studied abroad in Oxford, England with the College of Business Administration. I was there from May 31st to June 30th. While I was there, I was able to visit five different countries: England, Scotland, Germany, France, and Wales. In England, I was able to visit a palace, some museums, some churches, and a couple companies. Then, my friends and I took a weekend trip to Paris where we were able to see the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and the Palace of Versailles. After getting back from Paris our professors took our whole study abroad group on a weeklong trip to Scotland. We stayed in the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. While in Scotland, I was able to visit some castles, hike a mountain, see monuments, tour the highlands, and find a ruling clan with the same last name as me. From there I took a trip to Germany alone, so I could meet up with my family to attend my cousin’s wedding. Even though I was only there a couple days, I was able to visit the Mercedes-Benz Museum after the wedding. My final weekend abroad, my friends and I decided to take a trip to Poland where we got to see more castles, a concert, some churches, Auschwitz, and the salt mines. 

Interspersed with all of this travel were my classes. I took International Business and Operations Management while there, and I could not be happier with my experience. The workload was manageable but not boring, and the class times were fun and productive. In class, I learned about the ethics of outsourcing, how to operate in countries with different laws or customs, the flow of the production process, and how to find the bottleneck to name just a few things. From traveling and being in different cultures, I learned that I am more capable than I thought, the importance of planning, the joy of experiencing new cultures, and that kindness is a universal language. 

Overall, this experience has affected me greatly. It has made me more interested in studying, living, and/or working abroad at some point in the future by giving me confidence in myself. One of the main reasons I was always against traveling abroad before was because I thought I would be too scared and overwhelmed to do anything once I got there, but now I have evidence proving otherwise. I actually did go and do it, and I even did some things on my own. This experience has also revealed to me how much I love traveling and being in other cultures. Before this experience, I liked traveling, but I thought that stemmed more from being with family and people I am super close to rather than visiting new places. This trip cleared up that confusion. I enjoyed all the museums, the history, the sights, the castles, most of the people, and beyond that, I enjoyed simply walking around all the different cities and taking in the history and culture they carried in the buildings and traditions and streets.

View from a castle in Poland