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My name is Lynne McMullen,
I am an English Literature major,
and during the winter of 2012
I studied in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
I first started thinking about study abroad
when I realized that I had spent the entirety of
20 years in the Midwest,
and the world is bigger than that.
All of my friends at the time were international students
and I would sit and listen to their stories,
and sit and listen to their experiences,
and I couldn't help but feel like I had done nothing
and seen nothing with my life.
So that's when I first started thinking about study abroad.
My class in Cuernavaca was so different
from classes at the U.
There were three students in my class,
and the instructor.
We sat at a table no bigger than
the kitchen table in my house now.
There really wasn't any english. Some of the
instructors spoke more english than they let on.
You could figure out which ones those were.
I feel very fortunate that I had one instructor
that neither spoke nor understood any english at all.
Because that really forced us to work for it.
My speaking and listening skills improved immensely.
In terms of opportunities to learn about the culture
and learn about the area, one of the things that's
important on study abroad is that you seek those out.
The program and the school that we were studying through
did a really good job of presenting those
opportunities to us and making sure we had
the resources to figure out what was safe,
and to figure out what was feasible. And they
were willing to help us if our spanish wasn't
good enough to arrange things for ourselves.
I was very, very pleased with my host family.
I lived with and elderly couple.
But I was really, really, really fun.
Because I spent a lot of time with Clara
in the kitchen. That's what improved my spanish,
and that was my best opportunity
to learn more about the culture,
was just talking to her and trying to
talk around words that I didn't know to get
at some of the deep issues I wanted to
explore or some of the life advice she wanted to give me.
That was a really fantastic experience.
I really appreciate her, and I really, really
want to see her again.
I think the challenge and the personal growth opportunity
for me was forcing myself to try to think in the language,
and simplify the way that I would speak in english
to get the things that are important to me across.
So that I was still able to be the compassionate,
caring person that I strive to be in english,
but with the language of a five-year-old.
So that was just a great experience,
and I would highly encourage students who
are going to be staying with a host family
to spend time with your host family.
Even if you only have three weeks,
you can learn so much about the culture,
and you can improve your language skills so much
by becoming comfortable with the people around you,
that I just really think that that's the way to go.