Study Abroad Selections

I had a lot of ideas about where I wanted to study abroad. My final list of ideas looked something like this, in order of priority, interest:

Norway
Spain
Germany? Japan?
Italy? Finland?
Latin America?

Complicating matters significantly was the fact that most of these countries offered multiple locations for Study Abroad.

But I sat down with a chart of my remaining semesters and figured it out like an old fashioned logic puzzle.

Firstly, I have to do one of my semesters through the Journalism School, because I can only take one of my years off from the Journalism school and still get a Journalism degree, and I can only get Journalism credit on one of their programs.

So, looking at the options through Journalism, the most appealing one was Spain, because then I could kill two birds with one stone. The Journalism program in Spain is in the University of Navarra in Pamplona, and you can go there for a full year or for Spring semester. Spring Semester it is.

Next. Norway is really important to me, so I looked at it next. Mizzou has one program in Norway - an exchange with the University of Bergen. The weather there isn't great, or so I've heard, but otherwise it sounds lovely. You can go there for a full year or either semester, but Lene recommended (and it makes sense) going in the Spring - that way the weather is getting nicer, not uglier, you have the summer afterwards if you want to go on any trips, and you're there for Syttende Mai! (Not crucial, but nice)

This meant that I only had a fall semester to work with. For some reason, not many schools have a fall semester option. I started thinking about and looking at my other options. The main two are Germany and Japan. The benefits to Germany are that I could take my classes in German, becoming rather fluent in the process, and that Germany has a nice, central European location, so I could go on a lot of awesome weekend trips, etc. The benefits to Japan are that it's non-European, so I would be able to expand my cultural horizons, and gain maybe a working knowledge of Japanese.

I plugged these into search, and there was one possibility in each country for fall semester. However, the one in Japan comes with a strong recommendation that you have studied Japanese in University, and most of the classes offered at that University are about Japanese cultural studies - interesting, but not easy to apply to my degree.

So I think it makes the most sense to go to Germany - Bonn, in particular. Bonn (a former capital of Germany) looks like it has a lot of culture and great access to several cool countries in Europe (the Benelux, Austria, Switzerland...) which I'd like to go to for a weekend or so while I'm there.

So, it's more or less decided:

Pamplona, Spain
Bergen, Norway
and
Bonn, Germany

The only thing that remains to be decided are which semesters are which - since I have two fall and two spring semesters to work with. I think I'll travel the first fall, and be home the second to kind of break things up and keep myself from going crazy. Then there is just the matter of whether I go to Norway or Spain first, but I'm thinking it might be Norway because there could be advantages to starting my sequence before I go to Spain (if I go the first year I'll be admitted to my sequence but I won't have started).

There is also a possibility that I'd be able to take a summer internship in Argentina at some point, which would be great as I could expand my experiences onto another continent. (I want to be a travel journalist, so this is about more than just bragging about how many countries I have hit ;)) If that works out I might make Lucia come down at the beginning or the end of that so we can have our crazy Chile trip. :D