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My name is Matt Stang.
My major is Finance and Entrepreneurial Management
and I studied abroad Fall 2011
at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England.
I eventually decided that I wanted to play sports
because I play on a club basketball team here
but that's the extent of what I do
and I was huge into sports in high school
and so I did a ton of research to find the best sports
university that I could and talked to some coaches and captains of teams
and yeah it fit perfectly so I played golf, basketball, and American football.
It was a great way to actually travel across the country
for a golf match, a basketball game or football or wherever we were playing.
Socially since I was playing on the different sports teams
I was able to hang out with them every night.
It was the perfect way to meet people.
The football team took me out one night for curry and
that's not a big thing here in Minnesota that I know of
or that I'd ever had and it was huge there.
They had all these different curry stands and curry restaurants.
I lived in the least expensive university dorms.
My flat mates were from three from Germany, one from Spain, one from Greece, and
one from Nigeria. So that was a cool experience because I got to interact and hang out with all of them as well.
In Newcastle where I was which is up North in England
they had their own Geordie language it was called
which was very different from the rest of England
so when I got there I couldn't understand anyone for a month
it was literally like being in another country in a different language
so I was blown away by that and when we'd go down
to London or go somewhere for a sporting event that was elsewhere in the country
they'd be like oh yeah it's gotta be hard for you listening to all those Geordies up there
and their accent, so eventually by the end of it picked
it up a little bit, but something I didn't expect.
Academically I was a little surprised
we had class maybe half the time that we do here.
There, 100% of your grade is the final
so you just work all semester
or go to class all semester taking notes, listening to lectures
and then you do this huge project or test
all three of mine were projects at the end of the semester.
I was in the business school there, so I took
a modeling class in excel which was really helpful
for some of the internships i've had and something
that I wouldn't exactly get here, kind of its own class there.
I took a finance type class. I got to know my professor really well
in that class and she got me interested in
looking at consulting as a career option and more interested
in finance.
I think being on your own
and having experiences and challenges that you're not expecting
for me it was a great thing to develop as a person.
I just really wanted to have the experience of playing
on a college team and having a coach and going through practices
and going through the weekly grind and so that
was something that I will always look back on and say I had an absolute blast.
It was exactly what I wanted to get out of the study abroad program.