The most stressful thing ever? Making decisions, definitely. And right now there’s a lot of decisions to make. The most important one: Where do we go for our exchange semester next year? Or, are we going to go?

We all have three choices and we have to assign weight to each of the places which will also be taken into consideration. It is an entire game of gamble really, you don’t know who else is applying for the spot you want. And then there is so many other things you have to take into account: What program appeals to you most? What culture are you desperate to explore and what place do you want to travel?

After having thought through all these questions, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I’ll apply for the University of Tokyo and Venice, two very different places! What exactly drove me to do this, you may ask. First of all, Venice is one of the UCG partners, which makes the procedure of applying a lot of easier. Then of course, it’s Venice. An incredibly elegant and Beautiful city, which on top of that happens to be built in a place where cities aren’t usually built - on wooden platforms in the water. You can call it madness, I call it ingenius. Living in Venice for half a year would probably be a never ending educational excursion as it has to due to its huge offer of arts, culture and stunning architecture. In terms of water, I already thought that from living in Groningen there can’t be an upgrade but the students who are currently there are travelling to University by boat everyday. The program in Venice also aspires to me as the university offer multidisciplinary courses that unify humanities and social sciences.

Then there’s also option number 2, Tokyo University. Tokyo attracts me in the first place for it’s academic offer. Environmental sciences embedded in a liberal Arts and Sciences degree. That’s pretty special because it would enable me to study the environment in connection with humans. My second home in Botswana is directly located outside of a national-park. A large part of my friends there work in conservation, anti-poaching our are doing guiding in the safari business. They teach me so much about ecosystems and wildlife, the complexity of nature will never stop fascinating me. So often you hear the stories of the farmer having to kill the Elephant because it was destroying his crops or the poacher who has to rely on hunting because he needs to feed his family and it made me think: Coming up for solutions of preserving wildlife and protecting the environment will always involve people.

Then you see countries like Haiti, completely deforested because they have no economic alternatives. This helped me reach the conclusion that with the contemporary challenges we are facing in tackling environmental degradation, we cannot leave out the humans, which is why I am so eager to study this as my minor. Next to the academic part, Japan is surely also an amazing country in terms of its geographic location and the landscape. Apart from that, the japanese are known for their progressiveness and their incredibly good cuisine - I mean they invented sushi…

University is not only about studying books, it’s about life experience as well, and that is what I expect from a semester abroad. Even if it demands you to go out of your comfort zone at first, we have to ask ourselves: When is it ever going to be that easy to just live in an exotic country for half a year? I’ve discovered that throughout my life, I’ve grown most when I went from the known into the unknown, when I experienced a culture different from my own, because in those moments you also start reflecting on your own culture. So in case you ever get the chance to study abroad, I encourage you to embrace it!

You’ll hear more next week, it’s time to get Christmas organized now.

Cheers,

Eva