Spain: Megan Schwartz (My program experience in 100 words)
“They say college goes by fast. As a freshman that seemed like an impossibility, and yet now the phrase’s truth is clear. Soon no more exams, no more lectures, no more discussion sections.
Yet the learning is not over, and it never will be. We are all students of life. We are here to learn and to grow and to understand. Most importantly to understand that we understand much less than we think, and the more we know the more we realize we don’t know. I am forever grateful that study abroad has catalyzed my impending realization of this notion.”
Only using 100 words to describe my study abroad experience is a challenge. Describing study abroad when given as many words as I’d like is even a challenge. I talk to my parents, grandparents, siblings and friends on the phone, and it is difficult to get the feelings and experiences across in a way that I feel satisfied that I communicated them clearly. Given only 100 words made communicating my experience both easier and harder. It made it easier because it caused me to consolidate my feelings and express only my biggest take away. It was also easier because I only had to type 100 words. It made it harder because I had to type those 100 words in about 100 different ways to not only get it to be exactly 100 words, but also to give some sort of notion as to how studying abroad has caused me to grow. This process caused me to reflect on how when I spoke with the others who went abroad before me and tried to convey their experience to me, that although I thought I got a clear picture at the time its only now that I have been through it myself that I have a grasp. I believe that this is something that you need to experience firsthand in order to understand. Kind of like how college goes by fast but it’s not until it actually goes that you grasp the graduate’s warnings.
Meg Schwartz
Hometown: Middleton, Wisconsin
Major: Industrial Engineering
Program: Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid GE3 Exchange