Last week, I wrapped up my semester at CIMBA. Although I was looking forward to coming home and seeing my family and friends again, leaving Italy felt like a bittersweet goodbye. From sharing one last meal in Venice with my friends to watching the staff wave goodbye as we left campus for the airport, every moment during our final days served as a reminder of all I gained during my semester abroad.
In January, I arrived at CIMBA wide-eyed, excited, and a little scared for the semester ahead of me. Twelve weeks later, I left with new friends, lifelong memories, and an incredible amount of personal growth. If you’re a prospective CIMBA student, or even if you’re simply considering whether you’d like to study abroad, I’ll leave my experience below in hopes it gives you some insight into studying abroad with CIMBA.
Throughout the semester, I experienced so many things I never would’ve had the chance to do otherwise. From taking a pasta-making class in Florence to taking in Monte Grappa, my time at CIMBA was chock-full of memory-making moments. I’ll always be able to look back on the weekends spent trekking through cities across Europe and the week nights spent planning trips and playing cards. However, these moments don’t only serve as fond memories to look back on; they also create opportunities for personal growth.
If you study abroad, the ways you experience personal growth will be different than what I experienced. Nonetheless, I’m sure it will feel a little lifechanging in one way or another. For me, I felt like I gained more confidence in myself while I was abroad. I’ve navigated a lot of new experiences in the last three months, and because of that, I feel like I can handle anything that’s thrown at me. Whether it was almost missing a connecting flight in Rome, getting stuck in Lisbon in the rain, or navigating Nice with my high school-level French skills, I managed to make it through it all in one piece. After all of that, problems back home will seem like a piece of cake — at the very least, they’ll be in English.
Although it’s typical to experience some form of personal growth while abroad, I wasn’t expecting to experience growth in my relationships back home, too. I think it can be easy to take people for granted when you see them almost every day. Spending three months apart gave me the chance to miss my friends, family, and boyfriend back home, and it made me appreciate them more. I valued our phone calls and texts, and it felt good knowing my support system was still showing up for me, even from thousands of miles away. It felt even better seeing them again for the first time in three months.
Although every student’s study abroad experience leaves them with different takeaways, I’d still venture to guess that a lot of the growth I experienced while at CIMBA rings true for other students as well. It sounds cheesy, but spending a semester in Italy was truly a lifechanging experience -- I think everyone should study abroad if they are given the opportunity. I know I would do it again in a heartbeat.
That’s all from me. Thanks for following along during my semester abroad!
Sydney