Making friends in a new environment is tough. However, when everyone around you is also trying to make friends, it is a little easier. Going into this program, I was alone. I suspected it would be days, maybe even weeks before I found a good group of friends while abroad, but I was wrong. My flight to Barcelona left from the New York airport, JFK, and so did almost everyone else’s in my program. When I arrived to my gate, it was full of kids my age introducing themselves, getting each other’s numbers, and discussing their worries and hopes for studying abroad. There, I met four girls I now can’t imagine my time abroad without. We were able to sit together on our flight, taxi to our new dorms together, and shop for our newly needed necessities that same day. From that flight, we were inseparable. We went to orientation together, traveled together, had dinner together almost every night and everything else in between. I was lucky my flight happened to be the flight a lot of other students chose, but I do believe if I wouldn’t have met them, it wouldn’t have taken me long to find another good group of friends. There were 1000 students in my program, many of them coming alone like me. Because of this, although a lot of us were shy, we were more open to starting conversations, introducing ourselves and making dinner plans. We knew that being abroad would be hard, but we also knew that doing it without friends would’ve been harder. We worked harder to make connections and create bonds then we maybe would’ve at our home schools. I know not everyone’s experience abroad is the same, but being alone will truly push you to do things you would’ve never imagined yourself doing, like asking someone you just met to dinner.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: IES Abroad: Liberal Arts and Business in Barcelona