After a long day of travel I am finally back in the states! I miss New Zealand and all of my friends so much already but I know that I will see them all again one day and I will hopefully go back to visit. The best thing about making friends with other kids that are “internationals” abroad is that you now have friends from all over the states and the world that you can visit. A lot of my friends are from different states near me and others are in states all around the USA. I also made friends from places like Norway, London, south Africa and Australia and I would love to visit them all some day.
Overall I am just so thankful for the experiences that I had and I would do it all again in a heart beat. I got to see all of the south and north island of New Zealand and I also got to go to Samoa for my spring break! I did bunjee Jumping, Skydiving, hiking, skiing, white water wafting, and more! This is definitely the place to go if you are into extreme sports or if you are an adrenaline junkie like me. I went to a new place almost every week and I still feel like there was so much more that I could have seen. Even though I was there fro 5 months, I felt like there was just not enough time to do everything. I do however recommend staying after exams and classes end so that you can do whatever else there is left to do. I stayed after for a couple weeks so that I could travel around the north island before I flew home to the states.
The travel experiences that I had in New Zealand were absolutely amazing but the academic experiences were also interesting as well. it was quite a change from Rollins for sure. The classes were much bigger than the Rollins classes. I think my biggest class had about 800 people in a huge lecture hall. The campus was also much bigger than Rollins and so the commute to classes was longer depending on where you were living.
All in all, this was the experience of a lifetime and one that I will never forget. I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to go and do this and I definitely recommend going to New Zealand and more specifically to the University of Otago.