Program: IES Barcelona, Spring
Marija’s Major: Journalism and Communication Arts
How did your identities impact your experience? What advice would you give to students with similar identities who are considering a similar experience?
I’m a first generation college student. I had some natural guilt coming into the experience because my parents sacrificed so much for my older brother and I immigrating to the United States. But their immigration is what allowed me to have this experience, and I wanted to utilize it to the best of my ability. To other first generation students – use this time to do what you want. Let your parents live vicariously through you, and they’ll be happy that you made yourself happy abroad. Living these kinds of experiences is all my parents wanted for me. My family immigrated from Serbia, a country in Eastern Europe, so I also did go and visit them for a bit. It was special to see them. My father only came with his brother and parents when immigrating and left behind the rest of his family, and my mother was the only one from her family to leave. So I’ve always had that natural curiosity of what my life in Europe would have been like, because my parents never planned to leave; there was a war going on at the time they left. Living in Europe for a few months, I got to live a life I could’ve had if my parents never left.
I am capable of doing difficult things, such as leaving home for four months and living in a new country alone, which makes me generally more confident.
How will your experience benefit you in the future? How might it affect your future career or studies?
I went through so many challenges abroad (as every student does), with struggling to find the right friends, questioning if leaving home was the right choice, struggling with the language barrier at certain points – the list goes on. But embracing that this was a different experience, and that it’s one that I am lucky to have, made it feel a lot easier for me. It’s made me more culturally aware, as well as more mature. It’s made me more open to new experiences and I believe it will help me a lot socially, at the personal and professional levels. I experienced a number of uncomfortable situations by being in a new place, so it’s made me more ready for any challenges that come my way in the future. It’s also showed me that I am capable of doing difficult things, such as leaving home for four months and living in a new country alone, which makes me generally more confident.
What is your most memorable experience from your program?
I don’t think I can pick one experience to have been the most memorable. Honestly, every night I did something that felt like a movie because I was in a new city with new people – something totally incomparable to home. One of my favorite memories in my program was sitting on the beach with my friends to watch the sunrise after going out together. I didn’t grow up by a coast, so to have a beautiful beach nearby was awesome, and the fact that it was with new friends that I had genuine connections with made it so much more memorable, as well as some new people I had met that night. It’s an experience that can’t be repeated, and I’m forever grateful for it. Another one of my favorite memories was horseback riding at Montserrat. It was absolutely beautiful, and because I also didn’t grow up near many mountains, experiencing that environment during my horseback riding experience was beautiful.