Challenging and Meaningful

I highly recommend this program. I am a native Spanish speaker, and a Latin American studies major. However, this program accommodates anyone who wants to learn or improve their Spanish, as there are three different sections into which language classes are divided in order to provide helpful learning environments. The people in my group also had different majors and many of them focused their independent projects in topics associated ranging from Political Science to Art, Women's Studies, English, Music and Audio Production and Media Studies.

This experience, the classes, the field trips, the guest speakers, and the independent project, provided me with tools and resources I could not have otherwise accessed at my home institution or on my own. My favorite part of the program was probably the field trips and the people we spoke to while on them. In this program you spend time in the countryside, in the Caribbean coast, and in Cuba. All of these opportunities, along with the main course curriculum and the guest lecturers, help you prepare for a month long independent project. For this project, you find a mentor with the help of the professors and administrators, and can go anywhere in the country to conduct your research. You are given a stipend and must check in regularly in order to update administrators on your wellbeing and progress. This was the closest I have been to writing a thesis and cannot express how helpful it was to undergo the research process as vigorously as I decided to.

The mentor I had was extremely helpful and generous with their time. They gave me the contact information of people I could reach out to for my research, and the resulting conversations were incredibly informative and valuable. I was excited to be talking to people who wanted to share their views and histories with me, and often, I got the chance to do the same as well.

The readings and assignments are sometimes media oriented, which was very interesting, and we got to meet prominent leaders of feminist, environmental, revolutionary, and other key groups in the country, and the same goes for the time in Cuba. These guest speakers would come to our classes and provide lectures and discussions. This is an invaluable resource to understand current dilemmas and challenges, often rooted in colonial and neocolonial conflicts.

The homestays were lovely and although it is a very different experience from living on your own or in dormitories, it was refreshing to me to spend down time at home and with a family to share thoughts and learn from. Our language assignments encouraged us to start conversations about our host familiy's perspectives and experiences, and this helped me grow closer with them and also learn from my peers' experiences in their own host households.

Overall it is one of the best choices I have made and I can't wait to go back and catch up with the people I met there and learned so much from.