When you leave a spanish class at the University of Delaware, you can't run into a foreigner and practice what you have just learned. You can here. At Boston College, you won't be able to relate to your cultural interactions course with your everyday life. You can here. And at the University of Miami, Northwestern University, UCF, UMD, UVM, FSU, and yes, even Nassau County Community College, you can't leave your art history class and go see the painting in real life later that day. You can here. Studying abroad is not like school at home. It's not just reading textbooks and watching power points.
It's two-dimensional. Each and every class here at CEA in Barcelona somehow relates to the foreign world outside. Whether it's Spanish, Architecture, Art and Painting, or even business, we experience the material on the streets in some way or form. It's like the Magic Schoolbus for adults, except there's no magic and there's no school bus. And there's no Miss Frizzle.
What's even better, CEA hooks each of their classes up with a field study to replace that day's class. Just last week, I went to a Barcelona mosque for my world religions class. The week before that, I took a tour of the old city for my Architecture class. The month before that, I had a language exchange with Barcelona students learning English for my Spanish class. Two months before that I was at home.
People always say that studying abroad is an experience of a lifetime. It actually is. You will never again get the chance to reinforce your knowledge from the classroom through the experience of a foreign city. And the learning isn't limited to the material we learn in class. When you have an entire city at the tip of your fingers, its hard not to learn about something new everyday. You have the ability to visit countless museums, take any kind of tour you like (they have segway tours now), figure out public transportation, learn local phrases, and discover that the women on Las Ramblas in the skinny dresses aren't waiting for the bus.
So. If you're looking to open your mind to a whole new world of knowledge, turn your classroom into a city, and learn something new each and every dia of the semana, I think you should sign up right now to study abroad. Actually. Do it. I'm waiting. See, now you're just procrastinating...
Kenneth Wallach
University of Delaware '13
CEA Mojo in Barcelona