I drove home from school a few days ago, and at some point during the two-hour ride this huge smile found its way onto my face- as cheesy as this all seems. Until that point, I don't think that this trip seemed real to me. I've been planning and preparing for it for months, but I've been so wrapped up in school stuff that I hadn't had the time to even just consciously recognize that this is in fact real life! I think it was that moment in the car that I first realized that this wasn't just another crazy travel idea, but is actually happening-- in less than a week!!
Needless to say, I'm getting pretty excited for my trip! In telling people about it though, I think that it deserves a bit of an explanation-- why am I going to two major places in one big trip? As an RA on campus, I knew that I would have to go abroad during the summer. And initially, I was going to do the UNH Cambridge Program, to Cambridge, England for five weeks. I was all applied and had even recieved a scholarship for part of the cost. Then, I found out the date that I needed to be back on campus for RA training. I think that it was about 3 days before I would leave England. So really, adding in the travel time and a day at home to unpack from England and re-pack for school, I was looking at needing to take 5 days out of my study abroad experince. As great as the program would have been for me, I wasn't interested in missing almost a fifth of what I would remember as being my college study abroad experience. It just didn't make sense.
I had been fully set on my summer plans, but then suddenly found myself back at square one. I was slightly frustrated with the situation; at needing to put more time and energy into something that had already been taken care of once. In hindsight, I'd like to give a big thank you to ResLife for how the scheduling worked out-- not that they really had any control on how the dates fell. But seriously, had those dates matched up better, I would be going to England for about 5 weeks this summer-- and that would be it. I hear great things and definitely don't want to take anything away from what a great experience the Cambridge Program is-- there's a reason I had wanted to do it, after all. But I think that what was brought to me out of my misfortune of not being able to go, is going to prove to be such a unique experience-- not to mention double the time for a similar price! I'll make it to England eventually, it just doesn't look like that will be this summer.
In finding my new study abroad program, I didn't really have a specific destination within Europe in mind for study abroad, but knew that I didn't want the cliché trip to Paris, Rome, or the like. I'd like to visit them, definitely, but I didn't want to live right in all of that. After hours of researching different programs , I found USAC's summer program in Prague. Compared to the many other programs I considered, the selling point for USAC and Prague was the Travel Photography class. I am very much so an amature. Being in the process of teaching myself on my DSLR though, a class in travel photography was really appealing.
Aside from studying abroad, something I've always really wanted to do is volunteer abroad. Conveniantly, the USAC program in Prague left me with about a month and a half until I would need to return to UNH. Over a year ago, the CIE office at UNH had given me information on International Volunteer Headquarters (IVHQ), a volunteer program based out of New Zealand that has volunteer placements all over the world. They have a Facebook group that I had followed that whole year, through which I was able to see how much everyone enjoys their time with IVHQ, how safe they feel, and how affordable the programs are. When I proposed to my mom that I could go to Prague and then fly right down to Cape Town to volunteer, I hadn't expected to get approval. Clearly though, as I write about my upcoming trip to Prague and Cape Town, I got the okay to go!
Just the experience of applying, planning, and preparing to go has been quite a process. This time next week though, I'll be starting the best part of the experience-- actually being abroad!
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