“I have been lucky enough to have done two study abroad programs. So the first time was the summer after my freshman year in the Netherlands. I got a little bit nervous about being a new student, but I was really excited about the opportunity and wanted to go. So, I applied.

I ended up getting in. There were, I believe, 12 or 15 students total. It was a really great time. All business students, so I got to know a lot of other kids in my business scholars cohort. It was only four days a week of class, so every weekend, which was a three-day weekend, we’d travel all over on trains and planes. It was fantastic!

The whole thing was a month and a half, so pretty short. But I loved that because I still had part of the summer at home to be in the mountains, paddle board, biking, the parks were beautiful, so I really enjoyed that time too.

I was admitted into the U as an honors student and found that I could complete the honors degree in two ways. I could either do a study abroad in one of the three areas that they offered and then take a few classes. Or, I could do a bunch of core classes here at home. And for me, I really wanted to have another experience abroad.

Honors offers things that are interesting to students and sometimes those three tracks aren’t always appealing. So the next opportunity was through the university-wide study abroad program. And it was really amazing! We got to go live at a remote environmental science research facility in Kenya for a month and a half, and conduct research and work with other researchers there. We had visiting professors, one was from Belgium and the other two were graduates of the U.

They both did the Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program when they were in school, so they knew it well. They knew what the curriculum was supposed to be, and then the visiting professor from Belgium just happened to be an incredible ornithologist, and great knowledge of birds and ecology, and loves Kenya.

It was a very different experience from the first time I studied abroad.

Some days we went on a safari for a few hours. It was incredible seeing animals, watching the sunrise, or the sunset. It was a really incredible opportunity.

Since we were up in the mountains, we didn’t have a city where we could go explore, and we didn’t have a train that we could take to another country. So it was really all about conducting our own research on the days off from class and reading books.

We would also just go around watching the animals whenever we had free time. So it was a very different experience from the first time, but I liked that I had both. It was great!”

—Isabelle White, Presidential Intern, senior majoring in quantitative analysis of markets and organizations, with minors in games and the Honors Integrated Minor in Ecology & Legacy