Yes, I know, I did not blog as per usual last week. There were a lot of reasons, but the most significant was I had nothing that I felt like reporting. The first thing that I want to start with was a very serious point of frustration during my stay here. When you are accepted as an exchange student at TU-Braunschweig you will be give an Area Coordinator to be your point of contact at the University. This person is also who you will likely need to work with to get a handle on classes, your learning agreement, and probably more. I did receive any such help until it was too late to matter, but (and I want this to be clear) this was not the fault of anybody present. As it turns out, the best way to contact your Area Coordinator will be to use the email that you have on the TU-BS website. Any other emails that you use might be sent directly into the persons Spam folder. I spent several weeks thinking that I was being ignored, but it was just a stupid spam filter. This is very frustrating because things seem to be in a poor order. You do not get the password and ID necessary for your account until you have become a registered student, and (naturally) you need to complete a lot of complicated paperwork first. So again, I recommend that you sign up for a Peer student. It might be worth having your Peer Student contact your Area Coordinator before you arrive to get some things worked out.
Now for a little bit of a buzz kill. I have tried very hard to keep this blog positive and appropriate for all readers as I want to encourage others to spend a semester abroad, but you must be aware of something. It is not easy. It is more than just the struggles with the language and the paperwork, though those are significant, it is a struggle to be so completely cut off from everyone you know and everything that is familiar. It is not as bad for me as it could have been as the differences between the USA and Germany are not as drastic as with other countries. It doesn't happen too often but this last week was very difficult. Motivation, brainpower, and confidence all suffered a severe blow. I wanted to sleep, watch movies in English, or just go home; I definitely did NOT want to study German or do homework. This was only exacerbated by the fact my brain seemed to have lost it's ability to process Human Speech. I could hardly understand people or speak in either language and that just grated further on an already worn spirit.I hope that nobody misreads, I am not regretting my choice to travel, nor am I miserable with no fun experiences. It just turned out that, sometimes, it is a lot more difficult to cope than I had expected. There are several very easy ways to deal with this. Probably the simplest is to go on a organized study abroad program instead. For the most part, these programs are all organized and planned in advance so there is less (not none, but less) of the paperwork flood to handle alone, and you also have people that you know from day one. From my discussions with other people and their travels, a Host family is also another wonderful way to handle this. When talking with friends, their host families were able to help them with all of the day to day struggles as well as knowing how to plan trips that you will never forget. There are several other options, but it all comes down to making friends, and while friends help a great deal, you just need to be prepared for one simple fact. It is not easy. As such there will be hard times and you will become stronger because of them.
