The Most Important Experiences: Travel To Another Land

As Robert Louis Stevenson says, “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” Travel to another land is a shocking experience with Points for and against. Seven months ago, I was living in my home I was always under my parent’s protection, the support of my friends living and taking classes in a language that I dominate. By then, I had my life already planned, the university in which I would study and the place where I would work, but God had a better plan for me. Four months ago I went away from my comfort zone, I came from Mexico to the United States to study Chemistry at John Brown University as a Walton Scholar. This has been the most wonderful experience in my life so far, but also, be with strange people in an

Before coming to the United States, I lived with my family in an old, small and conservative town in the north of Mexico called Hidalgo del Parral. Given that I never was a very social people I used to spent most of my free time with my family. All nights we played Dominoes or Scrabble, also, we used to talk about our day in the diner. For holidays, when my brother returned to my house, we watched movies every night, and we went to row in a lake almost every day. Now, here in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, to 1,825 Km far away home I have another family, the Walton Scholars. They are another people from Latin America that won The Walton Scholar. They are now with who I spend all my day, they are more that friends for me, they are like a family for me, because we share the same language and a similar culture. When I am with them, we are laughing all the time; every weekend, we watch movies and dance together. For holidays, we cook some typical dished from our countries and we go out the city, mainly to

For someone like me, who all her life got the highest grade in everything is hard to accept the process that study in another language implies. Here at John Brown University the education is one of the best in the state. Teachers are really involved with wellness of their students, they do classes interesting and integrated faith and learning. Given the nature of the school, private, interdenominational, Christian liberal arts college, we follow a core curriculum, which include several Bible classes, English, science, the history of Western Civilizations, wellness, psychology , government, and philosophy. These study model is maybe not the best in my case, because at high school I never take subjects that I could use as a base for the core curriculum that JBU offers. During High school I was in a scientific technical school, which is more focus is practice than in theory, and my curriculum consisted in almost classes of science, which was a point to my favor. But, given that I was in a public school in Mexico, teachers really do not care about their students there. Teachers only go to class to explain a topic and evaluate it, they keep a really big distance between their students and them. But even this trouble, the classes in spanish are too much easy to understand for