In three days is the start of my life. A three hour drive to Richmond, two and a half hour flight to Chicago, four hour layover, eight hour flight to Madrid, three hour layover, one hour flight to Seville, and finally I’m home. For the next four months Seville, Spain will be the city I call my home.
As someone who has never been to Europe, I cannot even put into words all of the emotions I feel right now. As I sit here writing this in my childhood bedroom, listening to Noah Kahn, I’m flooded with emotions and memories of when I first discovered study abroad. In 2020, during eighth grade, I stumbled upon Emma Topp’s Semester At Sea YouTube vlogs. This changed my life, genuinely. It was at this moment that I realized that traveling the world was actually possible, and college kids did it all the time. From this moment on, studying abroad was my life goal. At 14 years old I started collecting spare change in my room and put it into a jar I decorated to say “SAS Fund”. In the six years that have passed since, I’ve graduated high school, worked multiple jobs, found new hobbies and passions, and I even moved across the country for college, but one thing always stayed constant, and that was study abroad.
Everyone who knows me knows that I never shut up about studying abroad. First semester of freshman year I was scheduling appointments with my advisor to see what my options were. I am forever grateful that I chose to attend Chapman University, which has an incredible study abroad program, and while Semester At Sea was not an option for me, it led me to finding my program in Seville. I’ve spent the last nine years taking Spanish classes in school, and looking at my options I immediately knew Spain was where I needed to be. I have already fallen in love with Seville and I haven’t even gone there yet.
Moving to California for college was the first big change I’ve ever really had in my life. I have always lived in the same house, went to the same school, and had the same friends since first grade. I wouldn’t want to change this in any way possible, but I was always aware that there is so much to see and experience in the world, and I was going to have to take charge if I wanted to gain these experiences. I have always been the person who wants to do, see, and learn the most, go further, and do the unexpected. I don’t really know how to describe it, but I feel like I truly just HAVE to experience the world and the culture outside of the United States. For me, studying abroad isn’t an opportunity that just kind of happened, I have been setting myself up for this experience for half of my life.
I am so excited to be able to travel the world, and document my experiences as a 20 year old college girl learning and finding her way. I know these next four months will be life-changing, and an experience I’ll look back on for the rest of my life.
See you in Seville!