A One-Time Life Experience: My Semester Abroad

I stood in line at the Denver airport gate at four in the morning, passport in hand, watching my mother cry for the third time that week. I was eighteen and about to board my first international flight alone, heading to spend a semester in Costa Rica through a university exchange program. My Spanish consisted of two years of high school classes where I mostly learned to ask for the bathroom, and I had never been away from home for more than a week.

My mother kept adjusting my backpack straps and reminding me to call the moment I landed. When they finally called my boarding group, I hugged her one last time and walked down the jetway feeling equal parts terror and something I could not yet name. That flight marked the beginning of an experience I would never repeat in quite the same way, one that taught me how profoundly a single decision can reshape who you become.

I had applied for the program in January of my freshman year, partly because my advisor said studying abroad looked good on applications and partly because my roommate Kate was doing it. When she backed out in March to stay with her boyfriend, I almost withdrew too. I had chosen Costa Rica because the program required minimal Spanish and focused on environmental studies, which fit my biology major. My parents were nervous but supportive, and my father helped me research everything from voltage converters to travel insurance. In the weeks before departure, I bought a phrase book and tried to prepare myself, but nothing I read or packed actually prepared me for the reality of landing in San José that June morning, exhausted and alone in a country where I could barely communicate.

The first month felt like living underwater. I stayed with a host family in the suburb of Escazú, and every meal required enormous concentration just to follow the conversation happening around me. My host mother, Marta, spoke slowly for me at first, but her two teenage daughters talked at normal speed, and I spent dinners smiling and nodding while understanding maybe one word in five. At the university, my classes were smaller than the lecture halls back home, and professors expected participation, which meant I could not hide in the back row. I remember one ecology class where the professor asked me a direct question about nutrient cycles, and I froze completely, my mind blank, until a classmate whispered the answer in English. That night I sat on my host family's patio and seriously considered going home early. The loneliness was physical, a weight in my chest that made even eating feel difficult.

Something shifted during my third week, on a field trip to Monteverde Cloud Forest. Our group hiked through fog so thick I could barely see the person ahead of me, and our guide stopped us on a suspended bridge to point out a resplendent quetzal in the canopy. I had seen pictures of these birds in textbooks, but watching one move through actual mist-covered branches, its emerald tail feathers catching occasional shafts of light, made all those glossy photos seem like poor translations. After the hike, I sat with two Costa Rican students from my class, and we talked for an hour in a mixture of their broken English and my broken Spanish, laughing at our mutual confusion but actually communicating. I realized then that I had been waiting to feel comfortable before I started participating, but comfort was not going to arrive on its own. I started saying yes to everything: salsa dancing on Friday nights even though I had no rhythm, weekend trips to the beach with classmates I barely knew, conversations with shopkeepers that left me exhausted but slightly more fluent each time.

Some people might argue that studying abroad is overrated, that you can learn a language from apps and learn about other cultures from books or documentaries. My brother certainly thought I was wasting money when I could have taken summer classes at home and graduated early. There is truth to the idea that travel has become a kind of status symbol, something privileged students do to pad their resumes. But living in another country, not as a tourist but as someone trying to build a temporary life there, taught me things no classroom ever could. I learned that my assumptions about how people should act or what makes sense were just that, assumptions, and that my discomfort with unfamiliar ways of doing things was my problem to solve, not something others needed to accommodate. When I finally left Costa Rica in December, I cried as hard as my mother had at the airport six months earlier, but for entirely different reasons.

I am back in Colorado now, finishing my junior year, and I will never do that particular experience again. I could study abroad somewhere else, but I would go as someone who already knows she can survive in an unfamiliar place, someone who already learned that identity is more flexible than it feels. I still talk to Marta on video calls sometimes, and my Spanish is good enough now that we can have real conversations about her daughters or my classes. I chose to write about this experience not because it was comfortable or because I did everything right, but because it was the first time I understood that growth requires actual discomfort, not just the idea of it. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had stayed home that summer, and I am grateful I will never know the answer.

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