Here we are again, and what a time it’s been since I last wrote!
When we last met, I had just effectively evacuated from Greece, cutting my semester short and beginning the long, dark winter that was coronavirus. It’s been a sad 17 months since then, but I am extremely excited to announce that barring any last-minute downturns, I will be back at the airport soon to start out on yet another study abroad experience, this time in… Tuscany!!
I am so lucky to go to a university that goes out of its way to make study abroad accessible and affordable, and even more lucky to have a university that changed its policies to make study abroad possible for seniors as well! Normally, Arcadia likes to have seniors on campus to write their capstone thesis paper, but as the past two thesis seasons have shown, that can all be done online and from any place in the world. That means that I will be writing two thesis papers for both of my majors while in Italy, but if that’s the price to pay to study abroad again, then bring it on.
I will be studying in Perugia, Italy, smack dab in the middle of Italy. This town is the capital of the state of Umbria and is a small university town in a rural region. I will be participating on a program called Food and Sustainability Studies, and I am really excited to explore an academic field that’s a bit more removed from the bureaucratic political stuff that I thought I wanted to do as a career.
The pandemic really gave me some time to think about what I really want to go into, and while I am still committed to being an active and informed voter, I’m not sure that I want to go into legislative work or anything in DC. My internship in Greece, where I was an English teacher for refugees, gave me a lot of ideas for jobs I could get in the humanitarian/ aid field, and I would love to be able to incorporate food into that and make a career.
My best friend is a German major and spending the year in Munich, so I will be accompanying her to Germany next week, spending some time there, and then traveling on to Perugia from Germany.
I hope you are all doing well, fully vaccinated and ready to begin living again. Have a wonderful week and I’ll see you in Europe!
Grace Goes Abroad 