Blog 1:

I originally signed up for this course because having studied abroad before, I can think of one or two local people from each trip who made a huge difference in my life and my experiences there because they were willing to grab coffee, chat, let me practice my language skills on them, and so on.  I really want to pay it forward by hopefully providing that to someone else.  That said, given that many of the students are international students who are here for their full degree, not necessarily just study abroad students, I’m realizing it might be a little different than what I expected, but that that is not a bad thing. 

At this point I’m excited to meet my group and am hoping that they are equally excited to start our coffee chats.  I know the first day will probably be a bit awkward as we all adjust to being in a new group dynamic and decide just how much of ourselves we want to share with each other.  I’m hoping that by the end of the semester though, we will all be comfortable enough together that we can have real discussions about the experience of living and studying abroad, cultural differences, etc.  I’m a bit nervous because many of the topics I love to discuss (especially politics and current events) are ones that people sometimes don’t care about or feel should be off-limits.  I’m sure that regardless of what topics we end up covering though, we will all learn a lot from each other.

It’s difficult not having had a group meeting yet- I want to start planning ideas and places and activities for future meetings but it’s impossible to do without having a feel for the group.  I might get a shy group who will be grateful to have an outing as a conversation prompt, or a really chatty group who don’t want or need to do anything besides hang out and talk/debate/question the whole semester, and an outing would just get in the way.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see!