A new semester is almost upon us, and that means a new group of SDSU students are heading out to study abroad destinations all around the globe! This spring, nine of them will be blogging for SDSU Be International.
Before you follow them on their journeys of discovery, let’s get to know a little bit about them!
There is a stark dichotomy in my neighborhood between decaying and ripening. The buildings are unraveling at the seams; the trees are growing. Death and life collaborate, producing resilience.
I came here to study resilience, and Tbilisi, Georgia itself is teaching me how to keep moving forward.
To travel is to dive into the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. We are left utterly vulnerable when we leave our comfort zones, so I decided to climb slowly down the ladder into the unknown, one rung at a time.
The first rung was studying abroad with the faculty-led program Issues of Gender Identity in Georgia. A city is much less daunting when exploring it with a group of 20 of your newest friends. Together we discovered a city painted in encapsulating murals and graffiti, a culture which survives on live music and wine and foods we will all be dreaming about until the next time we find ourselves in Georgia.
Continue reading “Tbilisi, Georgia: Women’s Studies Edition”
The first day of school is always the toughest. You know how, when you first got into high school, you had that nervous feeling that everything is going to go wrong somehow? I wasn’t even at school before it happened in Georgia.
Welcome to Tbilisi, Georgia: The city that loves you! I count this as my first day because I wasn’t able to make it to my first tour. And by that, I mean that I arrived a day late at 5 a.m. and since no one else really knew I was here, the carpool didn’t know about me. So I spent the day watching cartoons.
Continue reading “A Firsthand Look at Tbilisi, Georgia (Not the state Georgia!)”
I have never felt more spoiled and understood why people have this love-hate relationship with the United States until I walked into a classroom in the country of Georgia. I came with a group of about 18 other students from various majors for a two-week immersion on the geopolitical importance Georgia in the South Caucasus region. Yet I found myself in “classroom shock.”
Continue reading “Post-Soviet Universities and the American Perspective”
When I first signed up for the Georgia study abroad program I was very hesitant. After all, Georgia has only been an independent democratic state since 1991. But I take off today for this beautiful country the size of Illinois.
Continue reading “Let the Adventure Begin … in Tbilisi, Georgia”
The global experience, as told by SDSU students 