Karin Grevstad-Nordbrock ’27 reminisces on her semester abroad in New Zealand.
This past Fall I studied abroad at the University of Otago in New Zealand. I spent 5 spectacular months studying new subjects, making new friends, and exploring New Zealand’s natural beauty. It was incredible.
As I pause and reflect on my time abroad, a variety of bucket-list-worthy memories come to mind: skydiving, cold plunging in alpine lakes, watching the sun rise over Mt. Cook, and skiing in Queenstown. Amidst these highlights, however, I am surprised by the prominence of more mundane moments in my memory. I fondly recall making weeknight dinners with my flatmates, aimlessly walking around the city after class, and pausing in the chocolate aisle of my local grocery store in search of new snacks. Although ordinary and mundane, these moments fundamentally shaped my time abroad– helping connect me with the people, landscapes, and cultures of the place I was living.
Study abroad, after all, is not an extended vacation, but rather an opportunity to live abroad. We often assume, thanks to the highlight-reel culture of social media, that our time abroad will consist of a consecutive series of thrilling experiences, each one more epic than the last. And while this is not entirely false, as I can attest to, it’s important to recognize that a large portion of your time abroad will still consist of mundane, repetitive tasks, similar to those you perform back home.
I do not say this as a means of dampening your expectations for OCS, nor do I mean to suggest that you shouldn’t pursue adventure and new opportunities while abroad. In fact, I encourage you to do just that. My point, rather, is that you should not disregard the value of the mundane, for it is within these moments of ordinary existence that you are able to build a new life for yourself abroad.
By this, I do not mean simply living in a place for a set amount of time. Instead, I am referring to the process of deeply familiarizing yourself with the place you are living, to the point that it begins to feel like a second home. For me, this feeling developed in the moments between adventure– in the creation of sustainable daily routines, building of social networks, and increasing familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of my lived environment. This feeling– that I had singlehandedly built a new life for myself– proved to be one of the most lasting and significant takeaways from my time on OCS.
