study abroad – Voices

Being in Bishtek

Posted on January 15, 2020 by Dakota Crookston

By Dakota Crookston, ‘21 Moving beyond mosaic tabletops and colorful couches, the lot of us had taken our seats at a table in the back. The booth was grand, tucked behind thick drapes and lavishly upholstered. Our rowdy bunch eyed each other apprehensively. I knew that this moment would come eventually, but I thought it would happen after my own decision. I had not expect...

From Foreigner to Foreigner: Los Angeles to Seoul

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Kensi Martinez

By Kensi Martinez '21 Anyone who knows me can attest to my avid love for Quora, a question-and-answer website where you can find people from the likes of regular high school students to Barack Obama himself. I can spend anywhere from one to eight hours on the site daily, learning personal opinions, facts, and news—and sometimes writing them myself as the fourth-most viewed w...

Getting to Kyrgyzstan

Posted on August 8, 2019 by Dakota Crookston

By Dakota Crookston ‘21 My parents met online, I found Pomona through a web search, and I’m flying to Kyrgyzstan in seven hours because I googled “intensive russian study summer.” My trek started late last August, when I was scrubbing the internet for summer opportunities to learn Russian abroad. Unfortunately, the well-known Critical Languages Scholarship was out of the ...

Looking for Paradise and Finding Peanuts

Posted on May 31, 2019June 7, 2019 by Paul Kiefer

By Paul Kiefer ’20 In a few important ways, Morocco did not feel especially foreign to me. It is a Muslim country, and I am a Muslim. It is largely an Arabic-speaking country, and I speak enough Arabic to navigate comfortably. Moroccan cities are dense, but I have spent enough time living in college dorms to feel comfortable in close quarters. I went to Morocco expecting to ...

Building Friendships with Sweet Treats

Posted on May 29, 2019May 29, 2019 by David Song

By David Song ’20 In the fall semester of 2018, I studied abroad in Hong Kong through Syracuse University and their partnership with the City University of Hong Kong’s SCOPE (School of Continuing and Professional Education) program. Through this program, I spent much of my time with the fellow participants of the Syracuse & SCOPE joint-program: I lived with them in the s...

The “Abroad” in Study Abroad

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Libby Rose

By Libby Rose ‘19 (second of two posts by Libby Rose about studying abroad) During my study abroad program at University College London (UCL), I had four weeks off after classes ended to travel, and I learned so much about myself through that experience. I went on a European tour with two of my friends who were studying abroad at Cambridge. In just two weeks, we went to B...

Tips for Incoming New Students (or, Mistakes I’ve Made Over the Past Three Years)

Posted on September 25, 2018 by cyhg2015

By Cheryl Yau '19 As one of the Head Mentors for the International Student Mentor Program (ISMP), I have had the opportunity to interact with many new students. Questions I’m often asked include: what would you have done differently? What do you wish you had known as a new student? Unsurprisingly, there are many things I wish someone had told me, and, with that, here is Cher...

Studying Abroad … Again?

Posted on September 18, 2018 by cyhg2015

By Cheryl Yau '19 31 Dec 2017. I board an almost empty plane at Changi Airport, Singapore. Strike of midnight, and I am in transit at Doha Airport, Qatar. 1 Jan 2018. Here I am, in Cape Town, South Africa. I exit immigration to find a little crowd waiting for me—our (brilliant) program coordinator, Pieter, and some of the other students on the program who've arrived s...

A Man in Amman

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Ethen Lund

By Ethen Lund '19 [Ethen studied abroad in Amman, Jordan on the SIT Jordan: Refugees, Health, and Humanitarian Action Program] In Arabic, the name of this city is one character different than the word for safe. This coincidence holds credence in that the people of Amman are overwhelmingly benevolent. Crime is an afterthought, as the government and population take great pr...

Oceanía Es un Continente?

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Sarah Binau

By Sarah Binau '19 I was in my Spanish class at the public university (La Universidad de Chile) in Santiago, the sprawling, smoggy city at the foot of the Andes in the noodle-like country of Chile. Our professor, Claudia, paused during the lesson and remarked that our class had representatives from every continent. My classmates were a global mix: Brazilian, Japanese, Portug...