As I talked about in my previous article, I was ecstatic to be going abroad in the fall. It was the boost of encouragement I needed to keep me moving in the summer. Kinda…
I was both excited about it, but also uncertain if I would actually be going.
There was a lot of preparation that went into figuring out the details of my semester abroad. First, I did the easy part. I picked a program. I knew I wanted one in a Spanish speaking country so I could better my understanding of the language (I am getting a Spanish minor after all). The next thing I was eyeing was a program in Spain. I wanted the freedom living in a European country offers you: the ability to travel! Finally, I needed a program that had a decent amount of classes that would actually transfer over. Why would I take a class abroad if it had nothing to do with my degree? I would just be wasting money.
Only one program fit all three of these requirements. And that was how I determined I wanted to go to Valencia, Spain.
The next actual hurdle was then seeing what classes I could take and getting approval. Before I could be officially accepted into the program, TAMU needed to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time. So I had to get dean approval on all the classes I was interested in taking. That meant I had to find the school’s syllabi and email that specific syllabus for the course to the appropriate approvals person. And with BIMS, with it being such a broad degree plan, that meant I had to email an advisor of a different department for every single class I was interested in, then they would forward my email to the course equivalency expert. And then I would get the form back, saying if the class I wanted to take was compatible with a TAMU class. Sometimes I would get the form back, after waiting for several days, just to find out the class I was interested in was one I couldn’t take. The whole process was a headache and it took forever. I also couldn’t email the form to all the advisors at once because the abroad department wanted all the signatures on one single form.
Once that was finally finished, I could move onto the next step. And there were so many steps. This was while I was taking classes and work, so it was a big hassle. Towards the end of the spring semester, when finals were happening, I had to focus on school. So a lot of the things I needed to get done did not get done until I was free from classes.
Suffice it to say, a lot of the process didn’t actually get finished until mid summer. But that was probably because I was doing my abroad with an affiliate program, not a TAMU led one.
But because I was determined, and luck was on my side, I eventually made it to Spain.