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Hey guys, I'm coming to you from from Waterloo, just out of Sydney.
I'm at the very end of my study abroad program here in Australia.
I'm super sad to be going home but I've had an amazing experience so far.
The living accommodations are actually really nice.
We're staying at the Mariton, which is a full-service apartment
in Waterloo, just outside of Sydney.
Basically you live with either one roommate from the CAPA program
or two other roommates. So it's either a two-person room
or a four-person room. And it includes a full gym,
it has a pool, and you're right down the street from a grocery store.
So basically, you have everything you need in this little area.
The education program has a lot of different class options.
You can take anything from marketing to literature to cinema.
Your teachers are Australian, they come from the CAPA program,
and you study at ACU, which is the Australian Catholic University,
which is in North Sydney. Basically you meet for 3.5 hours
each week, and that's just one class. But you only have to meet
once a week, which is pretty nice.
CAPA places you at a different internship based on what you're studying.
I was placed at Havas Worldwide, which is a global advertising agency.
My job was in the account management section, so I worked on clients
such as *** Mobile, Peugeot, Citroen, Endeavor Energy, and Food Bank.
Basically, everything I did was what an account manager would do.
It was an amazing experience. I met people from all over the globe.
There's people that were French, Irish - all different cultures
in the office. So it was really cool to make connections with
people from all over the globe. As well as making connections
with Havas, because Havas is in New York in the States,
so I might be able to make a connection through that
and eventually get a job.
CAPA sets up a couple different activities as a group.
One of the activities is going to the Blue Mountains.
It was a really cool experience. It's a couple hours away.
But it's really fun. You get to experience the outdoors in Australia.
You also do Walkabout Park together as a CAPA group,
which is where you get to see koalas and kangaroos and do all that stuff.
Other than that, you can do excursions on your own.
I did a surf trip for a surf weekend at Seven Mile Beach.
Again, it's a couple hours south of Sydney, but it was
one of the most fun weekends I've had here.
Other people will travel to the Great Barrier Reef and do stuff like that.
You can do a whole bunch of different activities while you're studying abroad.
You have plenty of time to travel around because
classes are only offered Monday through Thursday,
so everyone has Friday off, unless you're interning on Friday.
So you can have a long weekend to go travel, if you want to
go up to Cairns and do the Great Barrier Reef, or if you want
to go to New Zealand for the weekend, which is something that I did.
You have plenty of time to travel around. Also in the middle
of your semester there is a spring break, so you have
a whole week to travel then. So there's definitely plenty of opportunities
to explore Australia, or New Zealand, or Bali, or anywhere around this area.
Typically you just get around through public transportation.
You're using the bus system, you're using the train.
For me personally, my job was right by where we studied.
So basically it was a 40 minute travel through bus and through train.
It's really not that far of a distance but it's because all
of the stops the train and the bus makes. That's how you get around.
Otherwise if you're flying within the country you can find
pretty cheap airline tickets. If you want to go to Melbourne
for a weekend, it's pretty easy to find cheap airline tickets.
So a lot of public transportation is how you get around.
The two things of advice that I have is definitely to budget.
Make sure you come to Australia with plenty of money,
so that you have money while you're here and you can
do the cool excursions that you want to do.
And the other is just to try everything. I know in the first
week we had emu pizza and we had kangaroo pizza,
and I really wasn't into trying kind of stuff, but I was really glad that I did.
And I was glad that I stepped outside of my comfort zone while I was here.