At long last, my semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina has come. With the long break between the end of the fall semester at Georgetown and the start of the fall semester in South America, its been hard to believe that all of this was real. I’ve suddenly found myself transplanted from my quaint midwestern suburb of 7,000 to a thriving metropolis of nearly than 13 million, complete with a different languange as well as customs and traditions. While there’s much to reflect on as I prepare myself for this experience of a lifetime, I think it’s important to focus on the magnitude of the opportunity that I am so fortunate to have been given.
As a student in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (SFS), it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the level of your peers’ international experience. Not even mentioning the many international students that fill the classrooms, most in the SFS come to Georgetown having traveled, lived, volunteered, or studied in various parts of the world, with some having done so very extensively. I came to the Hilltop with neighboring Indiana having been the furthest West I remembered traveling (this excludes a trip to California I took with my parents when I was 2 years old that included my only trip on an airplane) and a 7th grade weekend school trip to Toronto as my lone international experience. By contrast, my roomate, also in the SFS, had already been to 20+ countries including an extended stay in Spain.
Scrambling to catch up with my classmates, during the spring semester of my freshman year I interned in DC for a non-profit that worked primarily in Nigeria and then following the school year volunteered teaching English classes in rural Sinaloa, Mexico. Following my sophomore year I spent the summer in DC working for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in which I talked project finance with people from all over the world on a daily basis. Having developed an interest in hiking I was able to use my spring breaks to travel to both the Appalachain Trail and Yosemite National Park in California, and all of this is not to mention writing sports for The Hoya which took me all over the east coast and midwest following the cross country and track teams. When stacked up against the resumes and international experience of many in the SFS, the aformentioned paragraph isn’t all that impressive, however from a different perspective everything changes.
A little less than a year ago I was catching up with one of my high school track coaches on a long run, relaying all these great experiences at Georgetown, when he simply said to me: “Wow. Dave, you’ve already probably seen and been to more places at age 20 than I have in my whole life.”
It was there that it really hit me-here was a good friend of mine, a middle aged man doing quite well for himself and his beautiful family-telling me that I had been given opportunities in a few years that he hadn’t had in his whole life. I was so luckly, so blessed to be given the chance to learn at one of the top universities in the world and take advantage of all of the opportunities that come with it. Now I am about to be given the chance to study in another country-another continent-a completely different part of the world. Thinking a little more about it, I realized that most of my friends, and most people I knew for that matter in my upper middle class suburban community hadn’t travel outside of the country. Even throughout the whole country only about 1/3 of the 18 and over population actually owns a passport. All of this is in the richest country in the world.
In much of the developing world, travel, let alone international travel, is only realistically considered if individuals are looking to make a better life for themselves. Rarely are you given the luxury to see outside of the area in which you were born. Flashing back to freshman convocation, I can remember President DeGioia standing in front of us and instructing only one person in our class of 1,500+ to stand in order to illustrate the tiny proportion of individuals in the world that actually have the opportunity to pursue a college degree. Imagine taking that one step further to those that have the privilege of studying abroad and the proportion becomes even more staggering.
For this amazing opportunity that lies before me, I must thank my parents who have always so lovingly supported me and sacrificed so much to give me everything they could. Mom and Dad, thank you so much, you both have worked so hard for me to both attend Georgetown and take advantage of all of the opportunities that have come with that privilege. I have to thank God for blessing me and my family with so much in life. And I also have to acknowledge all of my teachers, mentors, friends, and extended family who guided me along the way so that I might put myself in a position to have this chance to study abroad.
While it can be easy to feel small in the internationally cultured pool of students that makes the SFS so great, I must not forget what a rare and priceless opportunity that I have been given. It is with this in mind that I will try to make the most out of my experience in Buenos Aires and I look forward to how this period in my life can help me grow not only only as a student, but perhaps more importantly, as a person.
