Different.

When I was 17 years old and preparing to go on my first exchange to France with Rotary, we had six months of trainings. They told us about everything we might face during our year abroad: host family problems, culture shock, language barriers, and the struggle of coming back home when it was all over. In everything that they taught us, there was one piece of advice that has stuck with me through absolutely everything that I have gone through in the last four years.

“Nothing is good or bad, just different.”

We were told this by a woman who served on the exchange committee and was herself a former exchange student with Rotary. She said that when she was abroad in Japan, a country with a huge cultural difference compared to the US, she told herself this every day, through all of the highs and all of the lows. This piece of advice was simple, yet one of the most poignant things I’ve ever been told. I adopted this as my motto through my exchange in high school, the transition into college, and the ups and downs that came with the first years at UO. And now, as I sit here back in France, the advice that I was given four years ago has come full circle.

I’ve been in France for just over two months now, and it’s safe to say that there have been highs and there have been lows. On the highs side, I’ve gotten to be back in this wonderful country, speaking the language that I love, eating foods that I missed, and seeing so many beautiful sights. I’ve been able to reconnect with French friends and host families from my high school exchange, go back to my host town, and explore my new city, Paris. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portugal with my roommate Camryn, and spend time with Ellen, my other roommate who I met while on exchange before. As for the lows, the rainy, bleak, dark Parisian weather of January and February made it hard to even want to leave the house. My exchange program being so small that there are only two of us here has felt rather isolating and lonely, as the only people I really know are my two roommates. As this program is a direct exchange, the study abroad office at UO basically left everything up to me, so I’ve had to deal with everything logistical by myself, i.e. Visa, housing, metro card, phone plan, French bank account, etc. The French bureaucracy is also a beast to be conquered in itself, which has taken a lot out of me. But, I think the biggest thing that has been an adjustment to me has been just how different this exchange is versus my last, which is where the phrase “nothing is good or bad, just different” comes into play.

For the past three years since returning home from France, I have been romanticizing the idea of living there once again. I would daydream about how no matter what I was doing in France (for example, school, thesis research, etc.), I would feel exactly the same as I did when I was 18 and carefree, spending endless worry-free days with my exchange student friends. I wasn’t looking to repeat the experience, per se, but the emotion, the feeling that I had built up in my head to be the peak of my happiness. I’m now learning the reality that expectation doesn’t always equal reality. In fact, it rarely does. And even more, I’m learning that it is okay. I won’t lie and say that it has been easy to be living such a vastly different experience here than I did my first time around. This time I have been forced to deal with nearly everything on my own, which has been lonely at times, especially when I had the comfort and security of a host family to rely on last time. However, this experience is teaching me so much more than I could have ever imagined, and I am finding a strength within myself that I have never had before. With my time here over halfway finished, many things will soon be wrapping up, and it’s time to really make the most out of the beautiful, challenging different experience I am living.

On y va vers le futur!

The end of an era (kind of, not really)

Well, after the most stressful, busy, complicated, and strange term of my life (thus far!), I’m happy to be writing this post from the comfort of my couch at home in Bend. I’ve got my cat next to me on the couch, my family and I are currently watching Netflix cooking shows, and a delicious Christmas dinner is in the oven... I am living the good life, and feeling incredibly grateful for it all.

This past term was filled with a lot of self-realizations in all realms: educational, professional, and personal. I won’t go too deep into the realizations that I’ve had, but to summarize, I’ve realized that:

a) I’m (still) truly happy with my decision to switch from being a Public Relations major to being an Advertising major.
b) When I enter the workforce after college, I really want to work for an agency or even in-house at a company that is actively working to make the world a better place and have a positive impact in people’s lives.
c) Hard work pays off. Really.
d) Going back to France is the right thing for me to do right now, regardless of what I feel I may be missing out on back home (FOMO, anyone?)

Though the term was crazy and felt like a total whirlwind, I was able to find many things I enjoyed, like meeting new friends and getting closer to those I already had, attending the AAF Student Advertising Career Conference, learning a ton in my super cool classes, like my anthropology class called Scientific Racism, and, perhaps most excitingly, getting ready to study abroad in Paris.

Yes, that’s right, I’m going back to France! For those who might not know, I took a gap year in Arras, France through Rotary Youth Exchange back in 2015 (you can check out my blog from my year in France here!). Since I returned home from my absolute dream of a year, I have been wanting to go back ever since. Every single day since July 20, 2016, I have thought about what it will be like to finally go back, see my favorite places, and be reunited with my incredible host families and French friends. And now I’m only 21 days away from my return!

I foresee this becoming a bit of a travel blog while I am away, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain the program I will be on while in France. I will be studying political science and humanities at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (otherwise known as Sciences Po Paris), which is one of the most highly regarded political science institutions in the world. Though I haven’t ever studies political science, I am excited to have this opportunity to learn something new and expand my world view in a whole new way. I will also be working on my thesis for the Clark Honors College, which will be examining how cultural differences between France and the US lead to differences in advertising and branding, and why these things work the way that they do. I’ll be living with a friend I made on Rotary Youth Exchange, and a friend from back home in Oregon. I’ll be in Paris from January until May, which counts as one semester or two terms.

My lovely mother and I in San Francisco for my French visa appointment. The appointment itself took 20 minutes, but we were lucky enough to spend three days in the city!

Because of this, I was only in Eugene for one term. About two weeks ago, I moved completely out of my apartment, said some goodbyes, and headed home to Bend to prepare for my time abroad. My mom and I also headed down to San Francisco to get my visa paperwork filed and completed (photo above!). However, leaving Eugene made me a bit more emotional than I ever thought that it would. I always believed that leaving for France, my second home, would come completely easily. I thought I would pack up and fly away. Simple. Easy. That is proving to not quite be the case. Thinking about what I will be missing out on during the next four months is hard. There are classes I would have loved to take and experiences I would have loved to experienced, but for now, that’s not in the cards. But, hey, I’m not complaining! Paris is looking better and better each day (well, not politically, but I digress), and this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

So, for now, it’s the end of an era of me in Eugene, and I won’t be back until next September (other than for a visit to friends before I leave, of course!), but I can’t wait to see where the coming months take me.

Junior Year, AKA Becoming an Adult?

It’s Monday night, around 10:30 pm. What should I be doing, you ask? Well I should be doing a myriad of things of which I am currently doing zero. I should be watching my online anthropology lecture. I should be doing my readings for my account management class. I should be preparing my discussion post for my Muslims in the US class. (When I list it all out like that I feel a little guilty for doing this instead, but since none of it is due tomorrow… it’ll have to wait.) So what am I doing on this rainy Monday evening? WELL, I’m currently partaking in one of my favorite and most stress-inducing pastimes… looking up potential agency internships for this summer, making a detailed spreadsheet of where each one is, what they specialize in, and who their clients are, and daydreaming of a summer spent in a hyper-modern ad agency with fish tanks built into the floor, seven on-site basketball courts, rosé on tap, and nap pods around each corner. (Does an agency with all of those features even exist? If not, it should.)

We’re now three weeks into the school year, and I’m already finding myself stressing about how my next summer will be spent. Or, more realistically, how I will get to the point of knowing where my next summer will be spent and what it will be spent doing. Even though I won’t be applying to internships for a few months, I feel like I need to start getting everything ready now. I’m trying to figure out why I feel the need to get on this immediately, and I think I know why. I finally am starting to feel like an adult. Not like, “oh I’m 18 and moving out for the first time, I’m an adult now even though my parents still provide everything for me and I have no idea what I am doing in life!” aka the way I’ve felt since I was, well, 18. No, no, this is a different kind of adult feeling. This is the kind of feeling like “woah. My future is coming and I want to be ready to make decisions that will set me up to be happy and fulfilled and thriving in my life.”

Why am I feeling this way now when I never have in the past? I think it’s because, for whatever reason, junior year has me feeling different. I’ve moved out of my beautiful 5th floor apartment with my best friends into an underground basement with five girls I barely know. Now, don’t get me wrong, this place is still really nice, and my roommates are all incredibly sweet and welcoming, but there’s something different about living with people you don’t really know compared to living with your best friends. Not worse, not better, just different. It’s made me feel more independent than anything else ever has, even living totally on my own which I did for a month this summer. And I don’t know why, but it definitely makes me feel more adult. Even walking around Allen Hall (University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications aka the place I spend the majority of my time) as a junior is different than it has been the past two years. I know more people, I’ve made connections with professors, and I feel more on top of my game than ever before. All of this to say, I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about my future in the ad industry and how I want to go about it. The largest struggle thus far has been deciding between sticking with design, which I have always loved, or transitioning over to the world of account management, which I have recently fallen in love with.

So, nothing this year has been bad, it’s just been different. I feel more adult, more like I’m ready to start seriously thinking about my future and my career, about cities I would and wouldn’t like to live in, agencies I would and wouldn’t like to work at, and exactly how I want to live my life, which is exciting! And scary. But I guess that’s what becoming an adult is all about.

Summer Time Feelin' Fine

Happy summer! The fact that we've already hit August is wild, and so far this summer has been a total blur, but the very best type of blur. On June 25, my best friend in the whole world (like, literally the WHOLE world) arrived in Portland from Brisbane, Australia after 18 long hours of travel. Sally and I spent an entire month together travelling around the Pacific Northwest, enjoying being reunited after 2.5 years of separation, and, because she studies marketing at her university, she was even able to come to work with me as a Marketing and Communications Intern at my office! While I was technically her "boss" we were able to teach each other what we know about business, marketing, design, and the industry as a whole, and on top of it we were each able to gain an international perspective.

Sally and I met while we were exchange students in France with Rotary International. We just so happened to be placed in the same region of the country, and quickly became best friends. We were lucky enough to be able to travel together in France, Belgium, and Spain and we spent an incredible four months together with other friends from all over the world. Because Sally is from the southern hemisphere and their schools function on a totally different schedule, she was in France for an Australian school year (January to January), while us folks from the northern hemisphere arrived in August and left in July. This meant that four months into my exchange and into our friendship, Sally headed back down under. Two and a half years of Skype dates and Facebook messages later, Sally and I were finally reunited!

During her time here we were able to explore Eugene, Portland, Bend, Seattle, and plenty of places in between. We sampled all of the quintessential American foods, like Flamin' Hot Cheetos and ranch dressing, and Sally got to experience the Fourth of July Bend, Oregon style. We got lost in Seattle, spent time with friends in Portland, and lounged around by the river in Eugene. Being able to spend a whole month with my best friend was the perfect way to start summer, and I'm beyond grateful to have been able to experience everything that we did. Sally headed home last Friday, and it's safe to say it has been a process to adjust to being separated indefinitely once again, but now it is my turn to visit her, so it looks like Australia is in my future!

Now that Sally is gone, I'm back in Eugene, working and experiencing what life is like in a college town when college isn't in session. It definitely feels very different here and is much more quiet, but I am occupying my time with afternoons by the river and online Excel tutorials.

So cheers to summer, reunions with old friends, and love so strong that borders mean nothing!