Student or Sightseer?

After this week’s group orientation, and after finally getting to see some of the other faces that will be participating in this program, I started to think about what I really want to get out of this course academically. We have all been in overdrive scanning the calendar Brian put together, buying travel books, planning out our free weekends down to the hour… or is that just me? Well despite our enthusiasm for going someplace new, I’m glad we got to switch gears last session and really start thinking about what we are going to be working on the entire month that we are in Oxford. I know I am not the only one giddy about the opportunity to learn in a place like Trinity College, and while I haven’t been hesitant to brag about this to all my friends, it really just hit me what this all means.

The attitude of this program is different than that of our humble university here, and is certainly different than the mind-set of a tourist group of teenagers. Our role expands further than studious undergraduates, but we aren’t solely taking on the city with our travel books and sensible shoes either. Being a study abroad student for the first time definitely thrusts us into a position that we have never been in before, and will only function in for one month. I suppose there will be a balance that we will have to find between studying and sightseeing but more accurately we will be embracing the curiosity of both mind and spirit. These two aspects will ultimately function together too; our research will inspire our traveling adventures and our pub crawls will inspire our final presentations…well maybe not that last one but you see my point.

Taking a holistic approach to this experience is crucial, and will be reflected in the type of research that I do as well. I want to explore the culture we will be interacting with first hand in juxtaposition to our own western ways and I want to do it in a socially conscious way. Humans in general are freaky creatures and studying the divide between two ways of life that are as intrinsically and historically linked as Americans and Englishmen is fascinating beyond anything I have ever had the opportunity to experientially explore before.