Return and Reflect

A unique aspect of Susquehanna’s GO (Global Opportunities) program is the required reflection course after the cross-cultural experience. For my reflection course, I am taking Self Exploration through Travel Writing. During this class, every student writes a creative travel essay about their experience or an aspect of their experience.  The students in my course completed different programs. Many studied for a semester in London, but there are also people whose GO programs were in Costa Rica, South Africa, New York City, and Spain.

Last night, the draft of my travel writing essay was up for discussion. My essay attempted to explore the dangers and risk-taking that are involved with studying abroad and the ways in which the experience pushed me out of my comfort zone. I talked about traveling alone, a night out in Dublin, my experience at Northern Ireland’s biggest night club Kelly’s, the Halloween parade I attended in Derry-Londonderry, and the news that a car bomb had been found in a city I was planning on visiting the next day, among a few other things. Though I loved my study abroad experience, the essay focused in on some of those moments of anxiousness that came with it.

I do not consider myself a creative nonfiction writer and find it awkward to hear people talking about me and what happened in my life during a workshop, but it went better than I expected it had. The class and professor pushed me to convey more about how these experiences impacted me, especially my personal growth or development during my time abroad. Of course, to convey this I really have to think about it, which I'm not sure I’ve fully done before.

In some ways, my first intuition is to say that I didn’t change all that much, particularly in my attitude towards risk-taking, but I think that might be because I’m not giving the matter deep enough consideration. I need to set aside some time to think about the ways I’m different after that semester abroad and then explore those in the subsequent drafts.

I am also going to have to revisit some of the experiences I talked about more closely, since I mostly wrote in a reflective, summarization mode and people wanted to see it be more scene-like, with more dialogue. This is going to call for much more recall of detail than this initial draft did.

Despite how much work I have left to do on this essay, I think it has potential and I hope to submit it to next year’s Essay magazine. Essay is the on-campus literary magazine exclusively dedicated to creative nonfiction.  In addition to wanting a polished essay ready for submission by the end of the semester, I hope I can also have some answers to those questions about growth and change over my time abroad.