I think reflection is one of those things
that once you get a taste of it, and once you get a taste
of how it makes you think differently
and how engaged it makes you feel in your life,
you just don't want to go back ever.
- A lot of times after people study abroad
and they come back, they don't really get the chance
to reflect on their experience.
- So I thought that it would be a really cool idea
to take a class that's focused on largely reflecting
on your study abroad experience.
Not only how you experience that country
or that place when you were abroad,
but how that experience changed you as a person
and how it carries into your every day life.
- So the course was co-taught by Francine A'Ness
and Prudence Merton, and they work together
to just kind of facilitate really deep discussions
and reflection
via journals and just in class activities.
- I actually went on two FSP programs.
One was the South Africa and Namibia FSP
with the environmental studies department,
and then last winter I went on the biology
foreign studies program based in Costa Rica
and the Cayman Islands.
- I got to meet scientists from all over the world
which is really really unique.
I got to go through all different types
of ecosystems, like dry forest, tropical forest,
the mountain regions.
- Being able to apply the skills that I learned
in say a predetermined lab
in a real world setting,
really reinvigorated my initial interest
in studying those subjects, and I didn't want
to relinquish that when I came back.
- A lot of times you come back to the same place
and you kind of have a hard time reconciling
all these new feelings that you have,
and all this growth that you feel like you've gone through.
With a place that looks pretty much the same,
you get back into the same routines
and there's not really an outlet for people
to talk about their experiences except for with the group
that they went with because it's very hard to convey
everything that happened in a nine
or 10 week program abroad.
- While I was abroad I was very much caught
up in the moment of the whole experience
of just being in a new country.
When I got back I started keeping a journal
of my study abroad experience rather than doing
it while I was there.
Being able to experience it again kind of gave
it more meaning.
- I worked on creating a website that integrated
the reflective essays that I had from class
on each of the locations that I went to,
with poetry that I constructed looking back
and reflecting on that experience,
and the photographs that I took in each of those places.
My story begins with a journey to a place
where the rainforest meets the sea, the Osa Peninsula.
A remote stretch of dense rainforests.
We learned how to integrate sound and narration
to the still frames that we took.
A place National Geographic calls the most
biologically rich terrestrial ecosystem on earth.
- I'll never forget that strange combination
of motions I felt on the morning.
I loved making something that I could actually
show people and that told a story and forcing
myself to piece together these photos that I thought
were maybe disconnected and then picking music
that made me happy and reminded me of my time there.
- Every day in France I walked along the River Saone
listening to the gentle rushing waters somewhere
below my feet.
In France water was just very central to my way
of living and that's very similar to how I live
back home in Montana because I live on a lake.
And so I feel like I intertwined those two experiences
to kind of make it feel more like home while I was abroad.
- A lot of my peers that went on the program with me,
I was hanging out with them when I was doing
my final project for this class
and I was talking about all of these things that happened
on our program and kind of saying what they meant to me,
and they were kind of blown of way.
They'd be like I haven't thought about that
since we were there.
I haven't
really understood
or given myself the space to think through
this since we were there
and I'm like kind of jealous that you've been able
to unpack it in this class.
So I think it's something that anyone that has gone abroad
can really benefit from.