Spring Study Abroad Programs in Poland

At first I wasn’t sure which country to pursue medicine in. I later found out about universities in Poland just before the deadlines. Medlink students guided and supported me through the whole process so even though I had a visa delay the university still accepted me. Now I’m starting my classes at the Medical University of Bialystok and I’m enjoying them. The university has been really helpful in arranging the lab classes I missed. Overall I wouldn’t worry too much about studying abroad because if you need help you can always reach out to Medlink students even during your medical studies.

During the 2023-2024 academic school year I traveled abroad to Seville, Spain with API abroad. As a Spanish Education major I was beyond excited to embark on such an amazing opportunity to dive deeper into the Spanish language and culture and travel outside of the United States for the first time. Due to requirements at my home university of Elizabethtown College I opted to live with a host family. This was the best decision I could have ever made and truly shaped my entire year abroad. The living situation was me, my roommate and our host mom, an older spanish lady with four grown children and lots of grandchildren. I later learned that she was the first person to ever work with my study abroad program to host American students in Spain, and had been doing so for over 25 years. Yaya (my host mom) truly became to me the grandmother that I never had. I learned so much more from her than just the Spanish language and culture, but about life in general and how to live it. She showed me kindness when I first arrived and could not get a grasp on the language, she included me in all of her holiday celebrations with her family including Christmas and New Year's and she even cooked a special lunch to meet my parents when they came to Sevilla to visit me. She truly went above and beyond to make me feel at home. The confidence and comfort I gained inside her home allowed me to blossom outside of it. At the Universidad de Sevilla I attended classes taught fully in Spanish with content in a wide variety of subjects such as literature, cooking, wine, phonetics and conversation, and teaching English to Spanish speakers. Through my coursework and connections with local professors I was able to participate in teaching English to both children and adults in the local community and schools. These professional connections opened new doors in my field that I did not know existed. One of them being the masters program in teaching Spanish as a foreign language and other languages through the faculty of philology at the Universidad de Sevilla, in which I am currently applying. This coming May 2025 I will be graduating and my post graduate plans simply consist of finding my way back to Sevilla whether that be through the masters program, teaching English, or simply working. The support in my housing accommodations, coursework, and excursions from my program opened my eyes to entirely new world of possibilities for my future and I could not be more grateful to have had such an impactful experience.