By Rick Vacek | December 3, 2024
Avalene Tan had just left the restricted area of Glasgow Airport when she realized something that would unnerve even the most experienced international traveler: She had left one of her bags in the restroom.
The airport worker she flagged down didn’t just volunteer to fetch it. She gave Tan her cellphone number to make sure they didn’t lose contact … and she found the bag.
“If I were to summarize Scotland in one word, it would be friendly,” Tan said. “The people there are just so friendly.”
Avinash Chivakula encountered several bus and train travel challenges during his time in Marburg, Germany, and was stunned by Europeans’ willingness to assist him.
“I could not have dealt with some pretty bad situations if people weren’t kind,” he said. “Their kindness was purely because they wanted to. That is important to learn. That only comes when you are put in situations where you need to rely on others, where you have to ask for help.
“I think that time abroad has made me believe in the capacity for good that humanity has.”
Those are just two examples of what Hobson Wildenthal Honors College students from The University of Texas at Dallas experienced last summer when they spent more than two months participating in research projects at the University of Glasgow and Philipps-Universität Marburg.
The laboratory lessons were illuminating. The life lessons compelled them to see the world in a different light.
“Good things will happen, bad things will also happen, but I don’t think it’s a reflection of the kind of person in one place,” Tan said. “You just learn a lot by exposing yourself to people you’re not familiar with.
“That was one of the best summers of my whole life.”
The research made it a great summer, too.
Ameera Hussain, a pre-med psychology major, loved the fact that her summer project was in a University of Glasgow wet lab. She handled the cardiac tissue of animals to study endocrine-disrupting compounds in the water-management system – pollutants that impact hormones and the way the body functions.
“In a psych lab you’re not handling any tissues,” said Hussain, whose previous lab work measured how psychology applies to research.
The new challenge was so energizing, she made it her senior capstone project before she heads to medical school at the University of Oklahoma.
Tan, also a pre-med, was equally thrilled to broaden her research horizons by handling tissues for the first time. The neuroscience major examined how components in tissues respond to shorter amounts of daylight in hamsters that reproduce seasonally.
The members of her research team grew so close, they plan to reconvene at a January conference in Atlanta.
“I was completely embraced by my team that was there,” she said. “Of all the things, I’m probably most grateful for that.”
Roma Patel, an economics major, used her time in Marburg to study the effects of panel surveys, in which a chosen group is canvassed regularly over the course of time instead of randomly on a one-time basis.
It solidified her desire to be an economist.
“I enjoy research, and I would like to do that as a career,” she said.
Chivakula researched how government impacts the structure of companies and vice versa. He learned something profound that could impact his studies as a finance and economics major and inspire him to pursue more selfless achievements:
“Great societies are built by those who plant seeds of trees they know they’ll never sit in the shade of.”
Not that long ago, these same students had to adjust to leaving home and living on their own for the first time.
But now they had to learn how to live on foreign soil, away from their friends and the familiarity of the campus environment, and for more than two months rather than only a week or two. That proved to be a positive, however.
“Being there for a full summer allowed me to connect with the people there,” Tan said. “I did my grocery shopping there. I did my cooking there.”
It was educational for Hussain in multiple ways.
“I learned a lot about myself and how to be in a completely new environment and how to be alone with myself,” she said. “Academically, I was experiencing a completely new setting and learned so much that I would not have learned had I simply stayed in the classroom.”
Patel learned that she likes a daily routine.
“In the U.S., I never would have known how I would react in a situation like that,” she said. “If something comes up and I don’t speak the language and my family’s not here, what would I do? Do I have the resilience, the fortitude to handle that? I think I found through the program that I do.”
Students considering a study-abroad trip might fear trying to scale the language barrier in some countries, but Chivakula visited places where not a single person spoke English. “I figured it out,” he said.
He discovered, in essence, a universal language:
“Everyone wants the same things. When we say, ‘We’re all human,’ what it means is that our problems are the same. They just take different forms, but they’re the same.”
These experiences could impact where the students will work – and live – in the future.
“Since then, I’ve just been craving that feeling and craving having these experiences that are completely outside my view,” Hussain said. “How many places do I not know about that I could be living in? How many people have I not met that I could be meeting? How many experiences have I not had that I could be having?
“I would have never thought I’d like to go outside the U.S. to practice medicine, but I’m really, really hoping that I find a way.”
Said Patel, “If the opportunity ever comes up, career-wise, to go abroad, I would take it.”
The discoveries outside the lab included the scenery and culture.
Hussain fell in love with Scotland. “I was obsessed with the nature,” she said. “It’s so green there. Everyone is always outdoors.”
Patel revered staying in a Marburg building that’s hundreds of years old. “It’s gorgeous. The architecture is beautiful,” she said.
Glasgow was the middle stop on Tan’s busy itinerary. She spent a couple of weeks in Paraguay thanks to the Maymester Program, which provides a shorter stretch of overseas study, and later traveled to Ghana to shadow doctors at a pediatric hospital that does not have running water.
Her assessment of the experience, made possible by Child Family Health International:
“I saw some pretty tough things, but I also saw that the way people operate there is so resourceful and so smart. I really feel like that experience showed me the role of being clever in health care and also in life. They were very calm.
“They had all their giant buckets in which they had collected rainwater for the past few weeks. They washed their hands with it and would use it to flush the toilets. It was inspiring. I want to be the kind of physician in the future who keeps that resourcefulness in mind.”
A life-changing experience of this magnitude can propel a student toward embracing a future filled with life changes.
“That’s what college is about,” Chivakula said. “It’s about having people you have nothing in common with, you haven’t talked to them, and all of a sudden you’re cultivating this deep connection. That’s what you have to do every day for the rest of your life, whether that be in corporate America or in academia.
“Initiatives like this go far beyond just seeing the world, doing academic research. It’s putting you in situations that ask you to give and ask you to try. They ask you to be better, to try something you didn’t think you were capable of.”
Hussain wishes she was a freshman again – she would have undertaken more of these opportunities if she had known then what she knows now.
“As you’re coming up, you think, ‘Study abroad, it sounds great,’” she said. “Now I’m on the other side of it and I’m telling everyone, ‘Trust me. You need to do it.’”