Reflection of My Experiences with the International Scholars Program

            Since I started at the University of Florida in the fall of 2016, I have had numerous opportunities both to travel internationally and to experience world cultures here at home. I have felt compelled to travel in college because of my past experience in traveling with my family; before college, I had travelled to Mexico, Spain, and Italy on family vacations. In the summer of 2017, I studied abroad in Australia for a month, travelling all across North Queensland and never staying in the same town for more than two nights. I was able to meet a wide variety of Australians, including a number of indigenous Aboriginals. I found it very interesting to hear their perspectives on their own history and their relationship with the European colonizers who settled in Australia a few hundred years ago and have since taken over the continent. I was able to do a homestay with a farming couple and had to help them brand their cattle, which was difficult for me as I practice a vegan diet. I also helped them build an electric fence and set up an irrigation system for an agricultural field. I had the opportunity to interview the husband on his opinions of various issues and learned that he once worked in a coal mine and while there developed a harshly negative view of the Aboriginal peoples. He also opposed a wind farm that was being built near his land because it would be ‘ugly’ to look at and prefers to keep powering his home with coal as he has his whole life. This experience helped me to realize that there have always been prejudices held by certain groups of people over others around the entire world and not just here in America, a bias I held because I have lived here my entire life. I enjoyed the numerous opportunities we had to interact with ecotourism specialists, often in National Parks. This trip also encouraged me to continue traveling around the world to see as much of it as I can throughout my life.

            Later that summer, I was inspired to travel to the Netherlands and Belgium with a friend of mine and experienced a number of museums and castles which gave me a great appreciation for European history. In the spring semester of 2018, I applied for and was accepted into the University of Florida Biology Department’s Semester of Immersion, a program where each class is taught intensively, every day for 5-6 weeks, before a new class starts. I took a course called Desert Biodiversity and travelled for two weeks to California, Arizona, and Nevada. There were several times where we were stopped at Border Patrol checkpoints even as far as 100 miles north of the Mexican border and this gave me a new perspective on how international borders can be points of conflict and heightened security. When I travelled to Mexico with my family before this, I had flown from Miami to Cancun and did not have to travel anywhere near an international border so I had not experienced anything like this before.

            In the summer of 2019, I travelled with my family to Switzerland and the Netherlands for a week and got to see many more art museums, historic castles, and beautiful mountain ranges. It was really cool to be in a place where the natives speak so many languages and are forced to do so because they live in such close proximity to so many other countries which speak other languages. This was quite a culture shock coming from north Florida, where you have to travel several hundred miles south to find a large population of Spanish speakers and several thousand miles to get to the nearest international border.

As my family members returned home, I instead flew to Nairobi, Kenya, where I conducted a research project and study abroad program at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County. Kenya has probably the most different culture from the United States of any place I have been to, so it took some adjustment to get used to everyday life there over the month that I spent at the Centre. One day we went to visit a Maasai village (actually on my 21st birthday!) and the tribesmen decided to serve our group cows’ blood and goats’ milk, both of which I had to decline. I felt bad for refusing the gift offered by the Maasai people, and it made me much more grateful for the fact that I am able to maintain a vegan diet so easily at home when it would be incredibly difficult in many other places around the world. That being said, it was actually very easy for me to maintain a vegan diet while staying at the research center because we had a well-equipped kitchen staff to prepare meals for us, and Kenyans do not tend to cook with very many animal products like cheese or butter so the only things I really had to avoid were meat and eggs. I was expecting it to be more difficult to find sufficient vegan food in Kenya, but it actually ended up being easier to maintain a vegan diet there than it was for me in Australia. I think this is due to the fact that I was traveling to new places the entire time I was in Australia, while I was more settled in a single location in Kenya. This taught me that I shouldn’t make general assumptions about a country, and in reality, conditions are largely dependent upon the situation you are in and can vary widely from place to place even within a single country.

            At the University of Florida, the campus life engagement events which I attended for the International Scholars Program also expanded my horizons and international awareness. I attended a seminar on the spice trade of Islam in the first millennium after its inception and participated in a discussion on the extent of Islam’s reach in terms of trade around the world. I also participated in an online discussion on the potential effects which the current Covid-19 outbreak may have on international businesses, in which I chose to focus on how this could negatively impact and potentially even bring an end to the movie theater business as entertainment demands shift in favor of at-home streaming. I also wrote a poem inspired by the Korean art piece "Hunting with Falcons" by Kim Hong-do for an engagement event, and thought this was a really unique way to encourage students to study international art. Additionally, I participated in an online conference call discussion focused on ‘The Danger of a Single Story,’ a TEDTalk given by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This was very impactful for me as it really encouraged me to think about the perspectives of others, like the residents of the many countries which I have been lucky enough to travel to during my time at the University of Florida, and how they may view me as a foreigner visiting their home. I have learned throughout my time at UF that I am a world-traveler at heart and that nothing would make me happier than to be able to see as much of the world as possible, so I am going to take every available opportunity to gain unique international experiences. Overall, I think that the International Scholars Program and the other international opportunities provided to me by the University of Florida greatly enhanced both my enjoyment of college and the quality of the education I received. I have been considering serving in the Peace Corps since I was in high school, but I think that the International Scholars Program and the Peace Corps Prep Program provided me with just the right experiences to convince me that I do in fact want to volunteer for the Peace Corps and I am eagerly looking forward to doing so.