Being a double major with a minor at a small university hasn’t afforded me the time to study abroad for a whole semester. Lucky for me, my university offers shorter study abroad trips that coincide with a class for the semester. The trips range from 7-20 days in a variety of locations.

In January 2016, I went on the trip of a lifetime when I got the opportunity to join 30 students from my university to travel and study abroad for a 12 day trip to Greece and Italy. We visited the smallest country in the world (Vatican City), saw more churches than we could have dreamed of seeing, marveled at the complexity and uniqueness of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture, and enjoyed extraordinarily delicious meals. We even got adventurous and strayed from our itinerary and booked a flight to the island of Santorini (that’s the one you see all of the pictures in magazines of) and wandered around in the pouring rain.

When I returned, I reflected on the experience, made a photobook so that I will always be able to look back on photos, even if my computer crashes and I lose them all, and thought about how lucky I was to have gotten such a wonderful experience.

About a month and a half later, the study abroad trip options came out for the following year. I told myself not to look at them because I knew that I would be tempted to go on another, but couldn’t afford it. I ended up looking at it anyway, and when I saw that there was a trip to the Galapagos Islands that would count for a minor credit, I knew I couldn’t resist.

In January 2017, I traveled to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands to take a taking a class all about filming with GoPro. When we returned, we spent the semester editing the film we had taken, along with creating a few other videos.

So, why should you take advantage of opportunities like this at your University or College?

The Friends…New and Old

My study abroad experiences allowed me to strengthen friendships I already had and make lasting new ones. Before going on both trips I knew people that were going and some of them, I was very close with. But the majority of the people that I traveled with were people I had only seen around campus maybe once. Being that we traveled in relatively small groups, I got to at least know everyone’s name by the end of the trip.

Stepping out of your comfort zone…

Both of my trips allowed me the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone. I had never been out of the country, besides to Canada, and had never been on a flight more than 3 hours long. It was an opportunity for me to explore new cultures and countries. We were in places where we didn’t know the language or the way of life. We had to learn to use public transportation, and sometimes it took a bit of trial and error (In Rome, we got on the subway and went the wrong direction). We ate foods we would have never tried back home.

You learn things you would never learn in the classroom

I know it sounds cliché, but I learned so many things on my trips that I could never have learned in the classroom. How to order wine correctly in Italy, how to interact with native people, how to climb a volcano without being extremely terrified of what’s below, how to bargain at an indigenous market, how to find your way around a foreign city without getting struck by a car, and the list goes on and on.

The Meals

Some of the food I ate on my trips are meals that I will remember forever. The juice in Ecuador was out of this world. It was so fresh, and every place we went it tasted just a bit different. As you can imagine, the pasta in Italy was really as good as they say it is. In Greece, we had lamb meatballs that were better than any normal meatball I had ever had. Coming back home to normal meals here was a bit difficult.

In the end, it was worth every penny, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. The trip to Greece and Italy is still the best trip I have ever been on, and my study abroad experiences will be something that sticks out in my memory when I think of my college experience for years to come. So…if you get the chance to study abroad, even if it is for a short time….Do it. You won’t regret it.