New campus. New students. New professors. New subjects. New regulations. New languages.
All of the change associated with studying at a new school is enough to drive even the most competent student mad.
Here are a couple of tips I picked up from my experience of “syllabus week” at a foreign university.
Read the tips here, and add your own!
It seems completely counter-intuitive to send study abroad students to a completely different place for their first week of orientation, only to shuttle them off to a completely new town with completely new family.
It’s paramount to doubling the culture shock, antithetical to IFSA’s promise of “More culture. Less shock.”
But, by George, it works. Transition to university has been easier than I could have imagined, no small thanks to my time in Liberia.
I’ve been asked a lot recently — by friends in the U.S., by American friends in Costa Rica, by Costa Rican friends in Costa Rica — why I’m continuing my internship at PBS MediaShift while studying abroad at la Universidad Nacional.
It’s a two-pronged answer, one answer more honorable than the other.
If you’re not a friend of mine on Facebook (sorry), you probably haven’t seen many pictures yet of my tour through the beautiful country of Costa Rica.
Check out the pictures on my ongoing blog at IFSA-Butler, my study abroad program. This time, I feature San José, the capital of Costa Rica, and la Rincón de la Vieja, an active volano.
I told my host mom the day I moved in that my Internet didn’t work.
15 minutes later, four different ticos, from at least three generations of the same family, were in my room (pictured here) trying to get my computer to work.
I’m here in Liberia’s Hotel Boyeros in Guanacaste, the northwestern region of Costa Rica. Guanacaste, in itself, has a fascinating story, as it voted to leave Nicaragua in 1824 and to annex itself to Costa Rica. But I’ll try to talk more about that later this month when the Ticos celebrate that decision in their annual festival.
Now, all of my reading up on Costa Rica’s culture and nature did help (I’ve been voraciously reading Lonely Planet‘s guide to the country), but I was still pleasantly surprised by what I found.
This is a first of a series of blog posts I’ll create about my travels throughout Costa Rica for the next four months.
Studying abroad was always something I knew I needed to do, but I never thought it would be this hard.
Take packing, by far the hardest part of predeparture shenanigans. It’s not just the logistics of fitting everything needed (and nothing more) for five months in two suitcases and a backpack.
But there’s also emotional baggage to unpack.
Zach C. Cohen 