Santa Clara University

Mary-Etta "Meg" Balicki '08

Peer Advisor

What made you choose to study abroad? Why the particular program/country/location?

            I  think I’ve wanted to study abroad for as long as I can remember, but once the time finally came around to actually do it, knowing where to begin was kind of overwhelming. There was a whole world out there, and I think I took an info booklet from the study abroad office for just about eveywhere. Then I took the time to get genuinely wrapped up in the possiblities, and slowly day by day, booklet by booklet, I figured out more and more about what I wanted  from my experience, personally, academically, linguistically, socially, and in the end, those things considered,  I just knew Austria was it. I encourage you to be open minded, explore your options, embrace the unknown, and consider what your goals are… and pay attention to those gut feelings.

 

What have you learned from your study abroad experiences that have contributed to your personal, vocational, or academic growth?

 

Before I left I didn’t realize how much I had been focused on how choosing to study in a foreign country would change how other people saw me. Little did I know that the most important perception of me that was to change would be my own.  And only then, slightly more humble than before, did my experience of

Vienna and of myself begin. Slowly, my narrow perceptions of what it meant to be a student, to be American, to be bold, to be beautiful, to be human, to be me… they all changed in one form or another.  And the contribution my experience abroad made to my growth was remarkable. Being able to look at things from a place, geographically, mentally and emotionally removed from everything I’d ever known, gave me an opportunity to step back and look at myself and my life in a different light. It’s hard to explain, but somehow I feel like my intuitive sense of who I am, what I want, where I come from, and where I’m going seems to be just a little bit clearer in just the way I never knew I needed it to be.

Your advice to prospective study abroad students?

“Do one thing each day that scares you”. I read that quote recently on a greeting card in the bookstore, and had to smile to myself. A knowing smile that comes with thoughts of the year I spent in

Vienna , a year full of opportunities to do things that scared me, to become stronger, wiser, and more beautiful because of them.  I learned that to go abroad is a big deal, but not the way that my parents saw it, as they proudly told their co-workers about their daughter studying in Europe, but in a terrifying, exhilarating, deeply personal, “show myself what I’m made of” kind of a way. No one else can know how many times I practiced the words in my head before ordering my first coffee.  No one else will know how many times I thought of turning around on my way to spend that first evening alone with young locals, or just how my heart pounded as I walked in and sat down with them. No one else could ever understand the emotions that filled my heart and pulsed through my veins that December night as I watched the first snow fall on a foreign city I knew I was managing to make a home in, in an empty apartment, void of my recently departed roommates, already back in America.  I breathed in that snowy air, and was so deeply moved by my own company, by how far I’d come, by how each one of those scary moments had shown me a little more of me, and I couldn’t wait for the ones to come;  moments like these with myself, more evenings with those locals, the ones I almost didn’t meet, a group of people that became dear friends and helped me to experience that place more intimately than I ever could have alone, and this feeling of being alive that seemed to come with doing each thing that scared me. It may sound dramatic to you, and it is. It’s a very dramatic experience, but in good way. And how dramatic your experience will be, how much it will change you and stay with you, that is, of course,  is up to you.