Reflecting on my semester abroad

Without any hesitation I would recommend studying abroad to any one who has the chance to participate. This semester was full of excitement, travel, new friends, and learning about new cultures. It was such a fantastic time, and having arrived back in the U.S. I miss it already.

For this entry, I want to talk a bit about the culture shocks that have come from living in Europe, but also the reverse culture shocks coming back into the U.S. For starters, airport security was one of the biggest surprises for me. Obviously in the U.S., airport security is a really big deal. It usually takes between twenty minutes and an hour to get through the security check in the U.S. You have to take off your shoes, put everything in different bins, get patted down, etc. In Spain it has never taken me more than 10 minutes total to get through airport security. It was surprising to me when I showed up two and a half hour early for my flight and then sat at my gate for two hours and 20 minutes.

Another really interesting difference is that you can retake your finals if you fail them. This only applies though if you achieve less than a 5/10 on your final. If you simply get a grade that you don’t like you can not retake it. Another school related surprise was that professors are more personal in classes than in the U.S. For example they ask for you to call them by their first name, and the class sizes are much smaller which makes the classes more intimate than some of the larger classes in the U.S. Also, I noticed that there were fewer assignments with the only assignments all semester being the midterm, the final, and a presentation.

Some non-school related differences include the absence of  water at the table which was very hard to adjust to. Water needs to be requested and it often is more expensive to order a bottle of it than a soda and other drinks. Another is the cleanliness of Spain. The streets are cleaned every single night and the subway is also scrubbed top to bottom between 2AM and 6AM every morning. Coming back to the U.S. and moving to Chicago has been a huge adjustment. While both are major cities there are a lot of differences between them. First off is the price difference for the public transportation services. In Madrid I paid $20 every 30 days for unlimited rides on the buses and metros. Here in Chicago I could pay $75 for 30 days of metro rides. Another difference is the amount of trash and litter on the streets. The cleanliness of Madrid is in sharp contrast to Chicago. Overall  both cities have their pros and cons and can not be accurately compared because they each are unique.

In the future I plan to travel back to Madrid. Due to the increased presence of remote work, I think that moving back and working in Madrid could be a real possibility for me!