Walking through the wormhole at Manly, Sydney

The first indication that I was far from home was seeing what I now know as a “bin chicken.” Everyone talks about the kangaroos, but nobody tells you about the gangly black and white birds roaming around. As I settled into the normalcy of the slang, meat pies, and cars on the left side of the road, the birds would continue to remind me all semester that I was in Australia.

Even before my first semester of college, I knew I wanted to study abroad. I always fantasized about walking through cobbled streets in Europe or basking in the Mediterranean sun. Plans changed when I actually started looking into programs. The University of Newcastle was the most realistic choice, and at the time I was concerned with getting to study abroad for a semester no matter where “abroad” happened to be. Newcastle has a great engineering program and a handful of beaches, so my decision was made. Looking back, I can’t imagine spending this time anywhere else.

Watching the sunrise at Newcastle Beach, Newcastle

Newcastle is on Australia’s east coast, two and a half hours north of Sydney by train. I took weekend trips to Sydney for the Mardi Gras parade, the Vivid light show, and just for fun. I liked being close to one of the biggest cities in the world while living somewhere less busy. Newcastle is not a tourist destination, so I never had any trouble finding a good spot on the beach or a table at my favorite cafe.

The University of Newcastle doesn’t have a biological engineering program, so I enrolled in some more general classes. This semester, I took microbiology, thermodynamics, an introductory animation course, and a linguistics class about indigenous languages of Australia. I was able to put my required engineering courses in a different perspective through case studies and practice problems specific to Australia. I had the incredible opportunity to use a professional grade stop motion animation studio to produce short films and get feedback from a real animator. The most unique class was the linguistics course. It was a seminar with only me and four other students, creating a classroom dynamic that allowed easy discussion and questioning. At first I found the class size very intimidating, especially because the four other students and the professor were already familiar with each other. After 20 minutes of listening to them talk I realized this was not an introductory level course. I felt out of my depth, but I stuck with it and ended up learning a lot from both my classmates and my professor.

Hiking in Cradle Mountain National Park, Tasmania

I was able to get involved on campus by joining the student-run mountaineering club. The club takes several trips every semester and accommodates all skill levels. Over the mid semester break, I joined a group of 50 students who camped for four days in the Blue Mountains. Other than hiking, all of the activities were new to me. I tried rock climbing outdoors for the first time, happily scraping up my finger tips. I signed up to canyon on day four. Canyoning is something I had not heard of until I got to Australia. It involves abseiling, or lowering yourself down on a rope, and then trekking/swimming/crawling your way through a canyon. I was so nervous about abseiling for the three days leading up to it that I almost decided not to do the canyon at all, but I went through with it. I couldn’t go all the way to Australia just to back out of a challenge. My first abseil was very rough, but I got myself to the bottom.

I have always considered myself spontaneous, but I never had any evidence to back up that assertion. Within a week of arriving in Australia, I sat down on a Wednesday and booked a flight for Thursday morning. I ended up in Tasmania with next to no plan and a roommate I had known for six days who decided to join my trip. I saw penguins in the wild and I sat on the side of the road at five in the morning waiting on the bus. I jumped off a waterfall and I hiked a muddy eight miles in white sneakers. There were definitely things that could have gone smoother with a bit more planning (my sneakers are no longer white), but sometimes the best way to learn a lesson is to be stranded in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country at the mercy of a public transit route that runs once a day. It’s all about collecting experiences, and I wouldn’t give mine up for anything.