My Time in Granada, Spain

For my STEP Signature project, I spent 5 months living and studying in Granada, Spain during the Spring semester of 2018. This experience was truly the best 5 months of my life and I’m forever grateful for the experiences and people I was surrounded with during my time abroad. I arrived to Spain in the beginning of January and started by taking an intensive month course of Spanish language. The month was followed by a standard semester where I took classes to fulfill my Spanish minor and GE requirements. I had class Monday-Thursday and spent almost every weekend traveling around Europe.

Over the course of my time abroad I grew as a person; culturally, intellectually, and personally. This growth not only transfers back to my time at Ohio State but will also help me as I enter the real world after college. It’s hard to sum up everything I learned about myself and the world during my experience abroad but my two biggest take-away’s were what it means to be a global citizen and perception of the world is solely based on one’s own experiences.

I took an optional 5-hour course through my study abroad program, International Studies Abroad (ISA) that helped me unpack the various feelings and emotions that students go through while studying abroad. When placed in an unfamiliar environment and forced to adapt, your brain is doing some pretty incredible things and I was able to learn what was happening from a biological and psychological point of view. The course covered what it means to be mindful and different cultural attitudes that we each feel about a different culture when we spend an extended amount of time there.

One of my favorite topics and the one that resonated that most with me was the topic of being a global citizen, what that means and is that possible today? While it means different things for different people I came to the conclusion that my definition centers around being adaptable when it comes to experiencing and living in a different cultural that my own. Part of being a global citizen is not trying to force culture on others when I experience cultural differences, but instead having the ability to adapt to the changing cultures around me. I believe the most growth happened to me when I decided to completely submerge myself in the culture around me. My day to day routine in Spain was completely different than my routine back in the states and at times this was hard for me. But ultimately, I learned to let it go and mold into the cultural surroundings.

My second take away centered around experiences and my perception of the world. The more I thought about this, the more I was fascinated with the idea and found myself thinking about it in everything I did and experienced. If you picture each and every one of your experiences plotted on a horizontal line with your highest experiences above center line and lowest experiences below the line you can determine the “width” of your range of experiences. The more life experiences, different cultures, and way of thinking you are exposed to, the wider your range of experience becomes and the easier it is to see your experiences in the context of others around you and the world. I began to examine my own life and my own experiences in this way. I represent a small fraction of the world that is able to be educated and even a smaller fraction that has the ability to study abroad. Therefore, before I have even experienced studying abroad my range of experiences throughout my life has been relatively narrow and positioned higher than the majority on the total range of human experience. I’m not saying that I haven’t experienced hard things in my life or that I haven’t experienced incredible highs but this range from highs to lows is relatively level compared to the rest of the world.

While all of our experiences are on different levels in the grand scheme of things my worst most negative experience is only relative to my second most negative experience. And the same for my positive experiences. This is why I believe we as humans are never fully able to empathize with other people’s life experiences because they are all incredibly different and measured only by ourselves. However, the more we are exposed to in the world the wider our range becomes and easier it is to see our life experiences as only a small part of the world.

Over the course of my semester abroad I had countless learning experiences. Whether they were small “aha” moments or deep introspective moments like the realizations I just described, they will impact me for the rest of my life.  Because I have lived and studied in a small city in Southern Spain, a culture and language far from my own, I am much more confident walking into unfamiliar situations and I have the certainty to face them. I am grateful for this experience and so excited to boldly face the next chapters of my life.

 

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