Amherst College Global Education Blog
Cuba is realllll different, from any other place I’ve been to. The airport, the taxis, the good, the rules, the regulations, the street grid, the Internet (lack thereof to be exact) really puts this case unrest in its own category. We arrived at Jose Martí airport and found ourselves opening the wooden customs doors to our freedom… Well, almost. The
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I’m Christine! I’m a twenty-year-old student from Brooklyn, New York and I’m studying in Havana, Cuba this spring. I’m a Black Studies and Spanish major, and I can probably be found dancing, eating, or cooking up trouble with my friends. I love my family, social justice, music, research, Twix chocolate candies, and my two godchildren. I spend
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Salve! My name is Konso Mbakire. I am a Mathematics and Economics double major spending my sophomore spring in Rome with the IES Rome program. Interestingly, I’m already an international student at Amherst College, so I’m studying abroad from my study abroad, which is extremely thrilling. I recently joined Amherst Dance and have been involved with the Amherst Christian
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Having returned to the United States for winter break, I miss the beautiful architecture of the University of Oxford and the city’s eclectic coffee shops. Much of the Oxford campus dates back to a thousand years ago, and the entire area is decidedly pedestrian-friendly. During my first term at Oxford, I was surprised by the enormous differences in the vocabulary in the
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It has been a whirlwind of an experience living for nearly five months abroad, and I still can’t get it through my head that it is ending so soon. I am busy packing, finishing finals, and reflecting on my experience here. With a few days left in Austria, I have been mentally listing what I’ll miss, what I’m excited about
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At the University of Oxford, I took a course on Modern British drama, which focused on plays written from the 1960s to the 2010s. I learned how straight theatre (which contains no singing or dancing) in the United Kingdom is often thematically darker than in the United States. The 1990s in Britain also witnessed the birth of “in-yer-face” theatre, an intentionally disturbing
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Being an international student feels very different, and I believe that my United States identity shapes much of my existence in the United Kingdom. Many Oxford students have travelled to the United States and are familiar with at least one North American city. British students typically inquire about United States politics and the country’s university system. Occasionally, I find it difficult to
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The video captures my daily life in Vienna, as a student commuting to school with IES Abroad and to the internship I work for with the University of Vienna Masters Program in Human Rights. I tried to portray what life is like day to day for a student studying abroad, and show viewers some of the sights of Vienna. A
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Because there is no affirmative action (or the like) at the University of Oxford, and the fact that the majority of the undergraduate students must be British citizens (the United Kingdom is 87.2% white), the student population is overwhelming white and largely comes from privileged backgrounds. In contrast, approximately sixty percent of University of Oxford graduate students are from outside of Britain, and
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I thought it would be interesting to delve into the school system in Austria, because it differs greatly from its U.S. counterpart. Here there is elementary school from age 6-10, and then at age 10 there comes a big decision that will impact the rest of the child’s life—to go onto the harder middle school and college preparatory high school
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