I ought to preface my first post with a little about myself, and how I first approached the idea of JYA. From the get-go, I was fairly sure I was going to be a proud member of the JYStay crew. While my friends know that in the right situations I can be a bit of a motor-mouth, sharing a bit too much and talking a bit too fast, if I’m not with a group of close friends, I tend to…
One week ago, I was squeezing the last of my sweaters into my suitcases, double and triple-checking the weight of my luggage, and trying to figure out which Danish cell phone plan to buy, in final preparation for a semester studying at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Very suddenly I was in the car with my family, driving to the airport – a drive that I had been picturing over and over again in my…
This semester, the Vassar-Wesleyan Madrid program started on January 7. Due to the polar vortex that hit most of the U.S., which manifested as a blizzard with “Arctic cold” temperatures in Western New York, my original flight out of Buffalo was cancelled. Rescheduling my flights was stressful and tedious—I spent about eight hours trying to reach someone at JetBlue. (Thousands of people’s flights had been cancelled, and the lines were so busy that the phone operators generally cut you off after a…
Notes on Paris I cannot believe that I’ve been actually living in Paris for a week now. I feel like I’ve been here for so much longer. But of course, I know that the days will start to go by really fast—too fast, in fact—once my schedule is set and I fall into a routine. There are so many things that I want to say about Paris, but for simplicity’s sake, I will only write about the two that surprised me…
From September 2013 to August 2014, I’ve studied and will study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. I’m a junior, double-majoring in Computer Science and Japanese. The program in which I’m enrolled is Japan Study, through Earlham College in Indiana. There are about twenty other students in the program, one of whom is also from Vassar. I’m living with a host family in Shibuya, which is a very wealthy and popular district of Tokyo. My host dad is the president of his company, so the…