An overview of the program

I arrived in Ecuador on a Saturday, and the following day our group was scheduled to go out to dinner for a meet and greet type event. The other students had already met at Ohio State during fall quarter, but only during a series of three info sessions. I of course had missed the meetings because of Semester at Sea. Sine I applied extra early I was able to attend the spring sessions (the program is held twice a year, during the summer and winter). I had a pretty good feel for how the program was structured and what to expect from classes, but it was odd being the only student who hadn’t met everyone else back at OSU.

There were about 25 Ohio State students in total, plus our two graduate leaders. When I arrived at the restaurant it wasn’t hard to pick them out, off in their own little group section. There were the normal awkward moments that come with meeting a bunch of new people, but everyone seemed to be nice and interested to hear about my trip the previous quarter. Several of the students had actually arrived about a week early and stayed together in a hostel, but the rest of them hadn't really gotten to know the others before the trip started, so (to my relief) I wasn't the only one that felt new.

Hanging with the students the first weekend
more of the gang (I ended up spending a lot of
time with Chase, center, over the course of the 10 weeks)

That Monday our classes began, and aside from several organized group trips we typically went every weekday for the next ten weeks. This was the schedule for a normal week: from Monday through Thursday we had class every day from around 9am to 1pm with a short break in between. After one o’clock we had the rest of the day to ourselves.

Many days I would go back to my host family’s apartment or to their grandmother’s house for lunch, but sometimes I would just eat out with friends from the program. We typically had an hour or two of homework a night, plus studying for tests, given every Thursday. On Fridays we would start earlier (if my memory is correct it was 8am) and end by 11am. We started and ended early on Friday because we often took weekend group trips, and we would leave right after classes let out to give us more time wherever we were headed. Later I’ll let you know more about the group trips and the classroom work, but that should be a good overview of the program and what my typical schedule was like.

If you are interested here is a like to the pdf for the elementary Spanish language program in Quito:
http://oia.osu.edu/pdf/countries/Ecuador-OSUElementarySpanishinQuito.pdf
And all of the study abroad options at OSU (there are a bunch!):
http://oia.osu.edu/programs/by-country.html

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