It is hard to comprehend that I am already sitting here in Seattle writing my reflection paper for study abroad. It seems like just yesterday I was excitedly calling my family on the phone to tell them I had been accepted into the program and would be spending part of my Summer in the Netherlands. Spring quarter flew by and suddenly it was time to pack my two suitcases and hop on my flight to Amsterdam. This program was my very first time leaving the United States and going abroad and I really had no idea what to expect from the experience. My experience as a whole in the Netherlands has taught me many important lessons over the past month, but some of the most impactful have been those that were on a personal level. From learning what it is like to travel abroad for the first time, manage both coursework expectations and social life to experiencing different aspects of European culture, it certainly made for a memorable learning experience. I am choosing to write my reflection from a personal standpoint because I feel that my experience in the Netherlands pushed a lot of personal growth and provided me with some of the most impactful lessons from the program.
I was so grateful when Kletia came up to me at the gate in the airport and introduced herself before we got on the plane. Having never flown internationally before, it was comforting to be flying with someone who was a seasoned traveler and had a good handle on how to navigate customs. Landing in one of the largest airports that I had ever seen, having someone to navigate with helped make the experience slightly less terrifying. The biggest thing I was nervous about was actually getting to the hotel since that was something we would be responsible for on our own with no familiarity with the Dutch transportation system. As I would later learn, navigating by train in the Netherlands is a relatively simple and stress-free task, but at the time it didn’t seem so simple. I was so excited but also so overwhelmed by knowing I was halfway around the world from my home.
The first two weeks of the program were the biggest learning experience for me in terms of navigating my way around Amsterdam and growing my confidence in terms of exploration. I really had an appreciation how the first week taught us a lot about the Dutch public transportation system and how to navigate around. The metro and trams, along with some help from Google Maps, are really quite easy to follow and figure out how to get to your final destination. After just a couple of days, it was amazing how much my confidence had grown in terms of being willing to go out on my own and explore the area. I ventured to different cafes, walked up to the canal to see a couple of museums through the pedestrian area and was able to navigate to both Museumplein and Centraal without even needing to consult a map. By the end of the week, I already had my favorite restaurants, gelato place and café picked out. Travelling by train to different cities in the Netherlands no longer seemed like a daunting task but rather a very convenient way to move around the country with relatively little effort required.
This confidence and willingness to get out an explore was one of the first and most impactful lessons I learned during my time in the program. I started out with absolutely no confidence when it came to being independent and responsible for myself in a foreign country. It can be really easy to want to stay close to the hotel because you are afraid of getting lost or having something bad happen. Sometimes, you just have to put that fear aside and realize that the whole point of being in another country is to explore, and part of that exploration is making mistakes like getting on the wrong tram or metro, which we did more than once. I never said no to making plans to go somewhere in the city and I was no longer afraid to get back to the hotel on my own if I decided I was done for the day.
When we started the program, the idea of even travelling to two other countries seemed kind of terrifying. By the time we hit two weeks into the program I was excited to plan our trip to Brussels and our last-minute day trip to Paris. It didn’t seem odd to be staying in a hostel or learning a new metro system even if it was far more chaotic than in the Netherlands. I learned to embrace the fact that we didn’t always have an agenda for the day and that nobody really knew for sure where we were going. Embracing adventure and having confidence in my ability as a traveler is what sparked our trip to Paris, which is the one country I have always wanted to see. Despite not even having a train ticket back to Rotterdam from Paris until the morning of our trip, I knew that somehow we would figure out how to navigate back to Delft and that all would work out just fine. Because of the lesson I learned in exploration and self-confidence, I had one of the best most memorable and unique experiences I will probably get to have in life.
During the program, I never expected that I would make friends that will remain friends long after college. I consider myself lucky to have found such an amazing group and gelled with them in the matter of days. When you live in a cramped room of four, that definitely aids in the bonding process, but I became close with so many people that did not live in our room as well. For me, these friends are people that I don’t always get the opportunity to interact with on the UW campus and I think it is really special to be able to branch out and meet so many people with such a diverse range of interests. I think there is a lot to be said that many of the graduate students asked us if we had all known each other before the program started since we had become so close so fast. To answer that question, we really didn’t. I think we just got really lucky that we clicked with each other so well. That being said, having an amazing group of people that you spend so much of your time with doesn’t come without its challenges, especially in the unique context of a study abroad program.
This brings me to the second most impactful lesson I learned which was that sometimes it can be really hard to balance academic, social and personal demands. I quickly learned within the first few days that I did not get any reading or blogging done in the hotel and that I needed to go to a café and work independently for a few hours. I got into a really good routine of spending a couple of hours each evening working on my blog and reading for the week. Setting aside that alone time to focus was really important for me so that I could be fully present and enjoy whatever other activities, both site visits and independent exploration, that we were doing during the day. I think that knowing when you need to be independent and when you can spend time with your friends is a lesson I will continue to learn through the remainder of college but being on study abroad really forces you to be conscious of this balance.
The other really important aspect of this balance is communicating, especially when you travel in large groups and are together for so much of the time. As fun as travelling to Brussels was, we definitely had moments of frustration with each other, many of which stemmed from a lack of communication. It is unrealistic to expect that nine people are going to want to visit the exact same places and do the exact same things, yet there were many times nobody spoke up to say they would rather explore something else. I recognized as soon as we got to Brussels that we needed a better system than trying to get everyone to do the same thing at once. I spent part of the first evening with Jack setting up a mini-schedule that included the things we had already agreed on as a group for the next morning and then all of the ideas, locations and who was heading the exploration so that everyone in the group could chose where and how they wanted to spend their day. Having everyone communicate their preferences to the group made the second day of travel much more relaxing and eliminated a lot of the frustration within the group. Simply communicating gave everyone the freedom to shape their own experience for the weekend and recharge for the last week of the program.
Perhaps the greatest struggle of all during our time in the Netherlands was taking nine people to a single restaurant. In many ways, I expected cultural differences to be things that were somewhat glaringly obvious, like how direct the Dutch are. However, one of the repeated things that stuck out to me was how different dining out in Europe is than in America. The first and probably most frustrating aspect of dining in Europe is the fact that they won’t split a check, no matter how large the table is. Eventually, we got smarter and started sitting at two different tables right next to each other to make it a little easier to pool cash or use someone’s credit card to pay for the meal. The second and to some degree less frustrating aspect of European dining is how much longer the entire process takes. While in most places we got our food relatively fast, we would be able to sit for two hours after finishing our meal without having a single waiter come up and check on us.
After dining out for a full month, I really think that it comes down to a very different idea of lifestyle and customer service norms in Europe. It seems apparent to me, especially after staying in Delft, that the Dutch in particular emphasize spending time with those around you and a much slower lifestyle, which is in huge disagreement with our American capitalist driven society. The consumer is not centered as the most important figure in their society, which is evident by the fact that you don’t have a waiter checking on you every few minutes and you do not tip at the end of the meal. Having been raised in this fast-paced consumer-oriented lifestyle, I found this cultural difference to be somewhat frustrating, but I also appreciated how different their lifestyle is. I went out to dinner the day after I got home with my best friend and it was weird being sort of chased out of a restaurant as soon as we were done with our meal. Even outside of a restaurant, I think there are a lot of positive aspects to learning to slow down and really enjoy the people you are with and that is definitely a lesson that I will keep with me for the rest of my life.
The last thing that I really want to talk about in terms of my experience in the Netherlands is sustainability and climate change. Having worked in the field of sustainability for over a year, it is something that is an integral part of my life and something I often think about. I was incredibly impressed with the biking infrastructure in the Netherlands, especially in terms of reducing their global carbon footprint. The amount and ease of access to public transportation, which is far more carbon efficient than driving, is also something that I think America could learn a lot about. While Seattle has what I would argue is a fairly well-run public transportation system, other areas of the country really lack this infrastructure. However, over the past month I’ve learned that sustainability is a learning effort and there is much to be shared in terms of knowledge across countries.
While the Dutch are far ahead of most countries in terms of carbon emission reduction, they could learn a lot from the United States in terms of trash collection. First of all, the Dutch do not compost and recycle which is something that I grew up doing in Seattle and that has become far more widespread in the United States. One evening, we were sitting at a restaurant in Amsterdam watching the garbage trucks come by to collect trash. The most appalling part was that half the trash was just strewn in the street, not even in a bag. Because so much of the trash is everywhere in the street, it requires street cleaners to make multiple passes to collect the rest of the garbage. I would imagine that some of this garbage does end up in the canals and ultimately makes its way into the ocean, which can be detrimental to the planet. It seems like such an odd contrast for a country that relies so heavily on a sustainable transportation system yet seems to blatantly ignore what I would consider a glaring issue that could be easily improved.
To branch a little bit into the intellectual realm, this idea of sharing sustainability knowledge between the United States and the Netherlands reminds me a lot of some of the innovator types that we talked about in the program. In particular, the chapter that our group presented on, which was the “Collaborator”, an innovator type that I could see fitting well into this scenario. The collaborator centers around bringing together many different viewpoints and forging innovation out of many different ideas. Having someone to bring together the sustainability efforts in both of these countries and look for ways they can help each other improve could push sustainability efforts in the Netherlands and the United States to a new level. The Netherlands has an amazing grasp on nationwide public transportation and cutting carbon emissions while the United States could offer better waste management strategies to reduce landfill waste and prevent waste from reaching the ocean. We are at a time when climate change is calling for a global collaboration effort, so imagine what it would be like if two countries like the United States and Netherlands began to innovate in the field of sustainability. In my mind, it would help make technology available to other countries that are lagging behind and potentially inspire other countries to collaborate and innovate in the field of sustainability.
This is by no means a comprehensive report of all the things that I learned during the program that the span the personal, professional and intellectual realms. When we started the program, I had no idea what I would learn or how I would grow, but I am happy to say that I feel I am a better person because of this experience. I made friendships that will last a lifetime and learned to be confident and explore no matter how scary that can be. I learned the value of communication, especially when travelling in a large group of friends and that cultural differences can be both glaringly obvious and subtle reflections of a different lifestyle. The reason why I picked the lessons I did for this reflection is because these are lessons that I know I will use and appreciate outside of the context of study abroad. I truly believe learning from a global perspective allows for a very different kind of understanding of the world and growth in ways you don’t get inside a classroom. While I have no immediate travel plans, this program has certainly inspired me to continue to explore the world around me and seek out opportunities to learn from a different cultural lens and perhaps that is the most important and impactful lesson of all.