There's a lot to be said about my semester abroad in Germany. These past few weeks home I've spent many hours with friends and family and as you can probably imagine, they ask a lot of questions about my experience and I have a lot of stories to tell, but even in the many hours I've spent talking to everyone, they still really barely have an inkling about the magnitude of what happened this past semester. That being said, these few paragraphs will be inadequate at best at giving you a full picture but I'll do my best.
One of the first things I'll say about the program is about the friends you'll make. Being new to the major and not living in the dorms my freshman year meant that I didn't really have any friends in my classes. Besides finding a whole new host of people to give me rides, I met a lot of truly lovely people. Many of these were in my major and I'll be spending a lot of time with them in the coming years but many of them were students in a different major, teachers, TA's and general program helpers. Having diversity among your friends is something that I never really appreciated, probably because until now, I never had it. Listening to other people who are really passionate about things that you never gave a second thought is good because of how much you can learn from them. Also the speed that I made these friends was astonishing(a product of being together for several hours a day). To put this in perspective, within 3 months of first meeting some people, I spent 9 days with them in 5 different countries. They were there when I opened my eyes in the morning, when I closed them at night and every moment in between. It's always a wonderful thing when you make a new friend and I can say that there are around two dozen more wonderful things in my life as a result of this trip.
The next thing I'll bring to light are the classes. They were smooth sailing at their best but near their worst I lost hours upon hours of sleep. In my first 3 semesters of college, I pulled a single all-nighter during finals in the fall of my sophomore year. This past spring, I pulled something around 9. With so many new things to experience that wasn't school, school work often fell by the wayside. As can be expected, my grades were not as good as they have been in prior semesters, but honestly it really doesn't bother me too much. The experiences I gained at the cost of a few hundredths of a GPA point was worth so much more. An important thing to mention about the classes that I should say before I forget to add it is about all of the integrated learning that happens as a result of being abroad. You'll learn about anatomy from some really really cool old wax models in Vienna and you'll learn about surgeries by witnessing them first hand. You'll hear a lecture about Freud in Freud's house and you'll learn about Hildegard von Bingen from a museum all about her near the place where her convent used to be.
The last thing I'll mention is the travel. In the downtime, theres a lot of traveling and sightseeing. In this past semester, I went to 10 different countries. To put it numerically, this is a 400% increase over the 19 years prior to the trip. Just a few minutes ago, I opened a Times magazine in a friends house titled "Great Buildings of the World", and when I opened it to a random page, I saw a place that I had already been. When I opened it to a different random page, I saw another place that I visited during my travels. It was a really cool feeling to see that.
In conclusion, if you're one of the ones on the fence about whether or not to go on this trip I would say do it. There's a lot of good times to be had and a few not so good ones but even during those, you'll learn about yourself and grow and you'll have a story to tell your friends back home in a few months.
TL;DR: Germany was cool people and you should do it too
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