There’s an old dirt racetrack down in Watsonville, Calif., only accessible by the long straight roads that divide berry fields. Every Friday night, crowds flock to the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds, clutching their cowboy hats and hot dogs, to cheer on their favorite drivers. The air quickly becomes thick with the nauseating smell of gasoline and the roar of the engines drowns any attempt at conversation. The track itself is terrifying—a quarter-mile loop covered with slippery mud that flies up to the stands. These aren’t your high-performance, well-oiled NASCAR machines, either. These cars are beat up garage ornaments being put through the most rigorous test—decrepit, declawed beasts with clunky exteriors and engines hand-built to give the most oomph for the least amount of cash.
Watching the cars race around this slippery loop is equally unsettling. The slippery dirt means that the cars must drift around the entire turn, crashing into each other and colliding with alarming frequency. Races are pure chaos.
It takes a certain kind of person to become an amateur racecar driver. But it’s important to note that the best drivers are not necessarily fearless; instead, racing requires you to embrace fear, to channel it, and to drive it towards success.
I’m trying to keep that in mind as I prepare for my semester abroad. While my destination is far from the strawberry fields of Watsonville, study abroad requires a certain embrace of fear and the unknown, not unlike the courage it takes to race a four banger in a 50-lap race.
Tomorrow, I will travel approximately 7,000 miles from my home in foothills of the Silicon Valley to the metropolis of Istanbul, Turkey, for the first part of my orientation tour. From there, we will spend a week exploring Istanbul and then travel through the country until we get to Alanya, where we will be spending the semester at Georgetown’s McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies.
Right now, the race official is waving the white flag for my final lap in the USA. It’s a matter of finishing up the little details before I leave—packing and repacking, saying goodbyes to friends, and making sure I haven’t forgotten anything (or too many things). But as I occupy myself with these details, I can’t help but feel slightly nervous about the semester ahead: a whole four months in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language and where there’s well-founded concern over the neighboring conflict in Syria.
However, I think the lingering feeling of fear is a good thing—it gives me a smart outlook, in a way. Fearlessness doesn’t get you anywhere—if anything, it causes you to act too brashly or to overlook risks. Instead, I must embrace fear; I must channel it through my fingers as I skid and slide across the slippery track I’ll ride for this journey.
Ready, set, go.
Shannon Galvin also documents her travels on her personal blog, as well as maintains general information on study abroad at the Study Abroad Survival Guide.
