Julianna Connelly is a junior studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador, majoring in English and Spanish. Her program, Quito – Area Studies and Language, is co-sponsored by IU and the Institute for the International Education of Students and allows her to live and study in Quito with a host family for a semester.
"I am taking five classes, all in Spanish, with three classes on Mondays and Wednesdays and two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In-between classes, I usually eat lunch with my family and either work on homework or take a walk through Parque La Carolina which is a large, beautiful, and very well-kept park near my house. After my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I take the bus to my service-learning internship, which is an after-school program for the kids of adults who sort trash in Quito’s dumps."
Julianna spends a lot of time with her host family, riding horses with her host brother and his daughter and attending religious services with her host mother. Some weekends she travels to other cities or national parks and hikes in the mountains. “Speaking Spanish all the time certainly took getting used to at the beginning,” she says, “but because of the immersive nature of this program, my Spanish skills have improved monumentally. While I would have been nervous to give a five-minute presentation in Spanish before studying abroad, I gave a 30-minute presentation in Spanish the other day without any problems!”
By: Devyn Blandford
