Semester of Progress

Santiago, Chile is a wonderful place to study abroad especially with the USAC program. This was a very exciting and entertaining program from the culture to the lifestyle to the program directors and professors. At first it was hard for me because I did not know the language as well as I probably should have, but I progressed and learned a lot thanks to the directors, advisers and professors, they helped me to learn words and phrases and made it easy and fun for me to learn and not be discouraged. I would recommend for future students to learn basic words and phrases to get around and have small conversations so you don't always have to rely on others for knowledge. Learn quickly and talk to your peers and supervisors in Spanish and make a strong effort to learn the language and be willing to mess up, even if you don't want to look dumb, it is necessary to learn and talk because practice makes perfect. This helped me to progress and my host family was wonderful, I could talk to them and they helped me through my struggles in the language. I recommend making a budget and each time you spend money put it in to a chart and label them with food, trips, transportation..etc just so you know what is spent and so you can be on budget, this was important to my time as I was able to do everything I wanted to do and still stay within a budget. My favorite memory was traveling to the South of Chile with the program group and bonding more with the USAC family and having fun all together as a group. Overall it was a wonderful program and I progressed in my language, knowledge and personal goals, I highly recommend this program.