Author: Samuel Vinson | Major: Biological Engineering & Physics | Semester: Summer 2024

Me, my roommate Anton, and my host mother Patricia.

Hi! I am Sam Vinson, part of the College of Engineering, studying Biological/Agricultural Engineering with a secondary major in Physics. I visited Puebla, MX as a part of the U of A Faculty-Led Spanish Immersion & Service Learning program in the Summer 2024 session.

I studied abroad in Mexico through this service-learning program because I wanted to improve my conversational Spanish while doing something technical for my engineering degree and also getting credits towards my Spanish minor. I chose Puebla because it’s a beautiful mountain town and the university I studied at Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla or UPAEP for short which is known for having an amazing international program. I was there for a total of 5 weeks / 35 days during the Summer 5w1 session.

Academically I took a class over Business in Latin America and also worked on a research project in a lab with the Engineering department’s Biotecnología and the Biotecnoambiental lab. My business class was led by Profe. Miguel and we analyzed cultural differences, ethics, marketing, etc. This class was a critical component to my growth in speaking and understanding Spanish. The course was instructed 100% in Spanish and boosted the immersion experience. Due to the class size being small (6 people total), the class took the form of mainly a discussion where Profe would spontaneously ask us questions to ensure that we’re paying attention. Profe Miguel is genuinely one of the best instructors I’ve had in my life by forcing us to be uncomfortable and grow through his unconventional teaching style.  Also we had roughly 5 individual presentations throughout the four weeks that we had the class which helped my booster my confidence speaking wise.

With my service learning placement in the Engineering labs, I was placed in the Biotecnoambiental lab (Biotechnological & Environmental). My project consisted of fabricating a bacteria and then testing the effect of that certain bacteria on plants. This project will eventually lead to a published paper that has my name as a co-author. More than that, in the lab, I was exposed to many different cultures. Since UPAEP has such great international reach, the lab members came from many different countries such as Argentina, Spain, Colombia, and México. As a result of that, I was forced to adapt to listening to many different dialects at the same time which was incredibly confusing initially but eventually proved to be great for my growth. Getting to know all the other lab members was more of a culture immersion talking about nature of our home countries, soccer, music, etc.

One thing about the program that is incredibly underappreciated is staying an a house with a host mother in Puebla. The host mothers cook breakfast and dinner every day and even though the food is amazing, the multi hour conversations you have with them every morning and every evening brought me so much insight and perspective. At the end of the trip, I felt as if I was really a part of her family as her sons and daughters and grandchildren would always come by, getting to see a part of their lives too. When I arrived, I was very shy about speaking Spanish and I was always thinking about what specific grammatical conjugation I should use, which slowed me down and that quickly changed by having to keep up with her speaking pace. Part of the breakthrough experience about the language learning that I discovered was that if I didn’t know a word, I would explain it in Spanish and the other person would typically be able to respond and my vocabulary was able to build much faster and actually stick that way.