Hi guys! This is my first blog post ever. I am Nina, a Colorado College undergraduate studying Neuroscience for those of you who do not know me. I will be maintaining this blog as I see fit for the next many months. I will make my first post about how I came to be where I am today, because I am an artist like Quentin Tarantino.
As a Junior in college, I am at the age of the “study abroad”. Last year when I was imagining where I could study abroad, I came up with a short list of random locations. Locations that my school had advertised, that people I was acquainted with had mentioned, and that I thought sounded kinda cool. Japan, Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa, Nepal, I don’t know. All sounded foreign…worldly…abstract. None of them were particularly known for hosting Neuroscience majors. None of them particularly drew me, I just wanted to travel in general. All of them had a price tag equal to a semester at my college. I remembered a thought I had had in the past: If someone gave me the option of a four-year private college experience and degree or a bank account with four years worth of tuition in it, I think I could grow successful with either. Choosing would be difficult. A college experience is unique, said to be the best years of one’s life. But I could educate myself for much longer than four years with tuition sized stipend. What if I applied this question to a semester? What if I didn’t participate in formal education for the semester, but I still found a way to learn.
I had extra credits, and didn’t see myself gaining enough from taking four more classes- on campus or off – to justify choosing formal education this semester. This wouldn’t mean access to a $27,000 bank account -if only-, but it could give me access to other opportunities. I could get a taste of the real world, I could take a break from school while many of my friends were off campus for their study abroad, and I could meet people who I could reconnect with later in life. Breaking out of the college bubble would allow me to return to my senior year fresh and recharged for academics and college culture. And so my quest began for an opportunity, a job, a volunteer position, an internship, a training… anything. Anything uncharted.
