Imagine climbing the Great Wall of China, exploring the African bush, being wowed by huge Danish windmills, or lazing around exotic Australian beaches. Add some gelato by the Coliseum, mocha in a Parisian café, narezushi in Japan, tapas in Spain, or paani puri in India -- along with rigorous academic instruction -- and you have a kaleidoscope of experiences that more than 450 San José State University students sign up for every year.
In a cosmopolitan city like San José where you can have dim sum for lunch and injera for dinner, where 100 languages are spoken on the San José State campus alone, why would students opt to go abroad?
"There is a difference between being culturally aware, having a cultural understanding, and having cultural competence," says Dave Rudel, study abroad and exchange coordinator. "You really need to come out of your comfort zone and go somewhere different to gain cultural competence."
What study abroad offers, he says, is a unique opportunity to do just that -- to place yourself in the shoes of an outsider looking in.
Veronica Malki, '08 Psychology and Spanish, appreciates the wealth of multicultural interactions at San José State. "But when I went to Spain," she says, "I was a foreigner. I had never experienced that before." Reflecting on the year she spent in Granada, she adds, "To live in a place where you don't know the language, you don't know how things work, you don't know the customs, you aren't aware of little cultural nuances -- like wearing gloves prior to touching produce on a grocery cart -- it can be daunting."
But a learning experience nevertheless. Malki continues: "I knew it would be hard, but I wanted to go through the whole spectrum of emotions -- the elation, the excitement, the homesickness, the frustration, the loneliness … Now, I feel like I am prepared for anything. The experience really helped me trust myself and understand that you can't control everything … it made me a stronger person."
Now working as a study abroad adviser in the SJSU Office of International Programs and Services, Malki had a variety of new experiences in Granada which, in time, became routine.
She bought fresh fruit and vegetables every other day from the corner grocery store and had a gas cylinder delivered every month. "Sometimes I would be taking a shower and the water would turn cold," she says. "That was always an interesting experience!" She learned how to teach music to children along with a host of local students. During the course of the year, she realized that Spaniards take time to relax and really enjoy life at a slower pace.
"They took siestas," she says, her eyes widening for emphasis. "They worked to make a living, but then they actually enjoyed life." A lesson that she's brought back with her.
"All through middle and high school, I used to say I want to travel, without really knowing what the term meant," says Tam Anh Nguyen, '09 Graphic Design, who recently spent a year in Florence, Italy. "Living in Florence and traveling during winter break and weekends to Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Prague and Budapest definitely pushed me outside my personal boundaries."
Nguyen, a first-generation Vietnamese-American, had only been on one international trip before -- to her home country when she was 17. "But I was just babied along by my parents and relatives," she recalls with a shrug. "They were there to do everything for me. I was seeing all these wonderful, amazing things but I wasn't really experiencing anything … it was more like sightseeing."
When she landed in Florence, Nguyen didn't know any Italian and certainly didn't know any of the other European languages, but managed to "talk" to locals and find her way around new cities.
Hand gestures and a smiling face helped.
"It made me a lot more social," she says. "Now I am more willing to put myself out there and just do things."
Nguyen also surprised herself by learning a fair amount of Italian. "I didn't think I was capable of doing that in such a short span of time," says the gregarious 20-year-old. "The first day the teacher walked in, I thought we'd get a grammar sheet or listen to a tape and repeat it; but instead, the teacher asked us to have a conversation with each other in the little bit of Italian that we knew. That was really different for me."
Soon Nguyen was chatting with local artists on the sidewalks, asking them questions about their inspiration and choice of colors. "They would be surprised at how well I spoke Italian and it was reassuring to hear that from a local," she says proudly. "Toward the end of the conversation, some of them would even lower the price of their paintings for me."
While they made memories to last a lifetime outside the classroom, these students also had some different experiences in class. "Over here, you know that as soon as the first week of the semester is over, you're constantly behind," says Malki. "Reading is the last priority because you've got papers, quizzes, projects, presentations and you have to study for the test. But in Granada, 80 to 100 percent of your grade was based on your final exam. It took a lot of getting used to, but I liked the freedom."
Cory Grenier, '02 Business Administration, experienced a similar format in Nottingham, England. "I liked their style in that they didn't have as many check points," he says. "I was able to adapt to that teaching style only because of the rigorous training I had received at San José State. I was used to doing my homework regularly and participating in group discussions, so I kept myself on track."
Nguyen never bought a single textbook during her stay in Florence. "It's all about experiencing the art … and I was surprised at how much I could understand even when the instruction in the second semester was exclusively in Italian," says the graphic design student. "We wouldn't just talk about some work of art. We would actually go and stand in front of it. Our professor was a curator for the Uffizi Gallery, so she would take us there on days it was closed to the public and we would walk through all the restoration labs and storage areas. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything."
Some of the students' best stories revolve around food. Although a McDonald's, Pizza Hut or Subway wasn't hard to come by, they tended to stay away from "American" cuisine.
"We had more Algerian, Indian and Lebanese food in our house than crepes, paella or hamburgers," reveals Malki, who shared an apartment with two French students, with Indian and Algerian heritages respectively, and a Mexican student. "We would go out for tapas, though, since Granada is the only city in Spain that still offers free tapas with every drink."
Malki grew up eating Lebanese food such as lamb tongue, so experimenting with Spanish cuisine didn't scare her. But one thing came as a surprise: cured pig legs hanging in the meat section of grocery stores with little cups plugged onto them to hold the dripping grease. "One of those legs could easily sell for 100-200 Euros," she says. "They would have them on the shelves in restaurants and bars and just shave off the ham and serve it with bread -- it doesn't get 'fresher' than that."
Oh! But it does.
"I've been to 30 countries in my life, but China was the hardest to adjust to," says Grenier, who had spent two years in Nottingham, England, first as a study abroad student and then as an MBA candidate, before landing in Beijing for a job. "The HR person took me to a local restaurant from the airport and there were frogs jumping around in this container waiting to be eaten. Then the server brought me a live fish and asked if this was the one I wanted to eat ... while I was still looking at it, the fish jumped and slid onto the really dirty floor. The server just scooped it up and we were eating it 10 minutes later."
At the same restaurant, Grenier was asked if he would like pork, duck, beef, lamb, chicken or vegetables and he said, "It's all okay," which was interpreted by the server as, "I want everything." He ended up getting enough food for a party of 10. "I felt really embarrassed and guilty," recalls Grenier, "The HR person graciously paid for it without batting an eye."
Grenier has since eaten everything from donkey to snake to silkworms -- but he doesn't get flustered anymore. "You start to appreciate the Chinese way of living," he says. "You don't think of it as strange because now you're part of that culture … you've made friends with the locals and you accept them just as they accept you."
Rudel, the SJSU study abroad coordinator, observes that varied as their experiences are, students who study abroad discover that all you need to become a citizen of the world is an open mind, the spirit of adventure and a thirst to learn. "They're changed in so many ways after these experiences," he says. "They come back with different self- and world-perspectives and they're raring to make meaningful contributions to the world."
Cory Grenier is well on his way. He is now executive assistant to the vice president at the Beijing offices of Lenovo, an award-winning world leader in personal computers and major sponsor of the Beijing Olympics.
-- Mansi Bhatia
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