Even after I arrived in Europe, I had no idea what was truly possible. Sure, there was a lot of freedom, and it was cool to live in Rome, Italy for a semester– but there is so much more that’s available to you, stuff that I really wished I had known about.
Living in another country creates a truly unique opportunity that should be utilized to the fullest. Never again will you be in a situation quite like it–for instance, all my friends and I took trips to Switzerland (to snowboard and go skydiving), Paris, France–Madrid, Spain–Cairo, Egypt–Tunisia–North Africa (for spring break)–Study trips in Taormina, Sicily–Rome, Italy–Istanbul, Turkey–Athens, Greece–a family stay in Trento, Italy–Florence, Italy– and numerous cities all over Europe, North Africa, Sicily, and the Middle East.
My roommate, Sean, and I even decided to take the confidence we gained while studying abroad and go ‘hostel-hopping’ in 6 different cities all over China — We never would have had the skills, knowledge, and confidence required to go off and live in China right after graduation. The crazy thing is — my roommate and I both revealed to each other that we were the guys who were most apprehensive about studying abroad in the first place! This entire journey almost never happened because we had no idea what were getting ourselves into in terms of maintaining some level of comfort, the constant travel (that we THOUGHT we hated), finding a decent gym, taking the necessary classes, financing the whole trip, etc.–even though my family revealed that if they had tried to do ALL that we did while studying abroad–it would have cost them 10X as much money as we spent! We did all we wanted for a tiny fraction of what it could cost, and we had ZERO regrets…
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