Oozing over with reflectiveness

I didn’t have a lot of expectations coming to New Zealand. My last semester at Morris was challenging. Trying to create and complete my interdisciplinary honors project and carry on despite its consistent deviation away from what I wanted to be the focus (the topic itself wasn’t what I would have preferred to do because professors had left and instead grew more and more into an argument about a tiny historiographical detail that didn’t really ultimately matter for the field of geology or philosophy) When I finally got it done and defended, I had to immediately turn around and start a huge mess of philosophy assignments while trying to attend to other senior sem projects, tidy up the affairs of clubs with which I was affiliated, and generally do every characteristic Morrisian activity I could before I left for good. That said, I didn’t have a ton of time to imagine what New Zealand would be like. When I did think about it though, my ideas about NZ were framed around academic aims, potential cultural experiences, and excitement about different natural phenomena I might observe. But when I think about defining moments in my experiences in Otago, many of them are just life lessons about dealing with people, not Kiwis specifically. Buying and selling a car, trying to navigate through flat disputes, cooking, etc. Living abroad forced me to make a lot of tough decisions on my own because those who I usually count on to give in advice were not necessarily around (due to 17 hour time gap) or able to be contacted (due to sketchy internet service) when I needed them.

If you had told me when I was a freshman that during university I would go abroad at all much less live in another country for a full year, I would have laughed until my sides hurt too much to stand. I had been ill for too long to even have the desire to be well enough to travel – I couldn’t remember what it would be like not to be nauseous all the time or imagine reaching a point where I wouldn’t be concerned about the possiblity of throwing up in public places. I distinctly remember going to a scholarship information meeting at the beginning of sophomore year and deciding that none of them were applicable to me because they were either extremely specific or involved some abroad component. To have last minute decided to enter the honors program, to have heard about the abroad trip to Scotland while on the way back from the annual Gutherie trip (and thus got up the nerve to go far before it was an official program), to have gone to Scotland and been extremely sorry I had not tried to attend a uni abroad for a whole semester, and to have gotten a chance after all of those lovely coincidences...there aren’t enough synonyms for “lucky”.