Josie spent her fall semester of junior year in Quito, Ecuador, specifically the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In reflecting on her reasons for choosing Ecuador, Josie said of her experience discussing this with GEO: “I’m interested in environmental studies, and I really want to do something Spanish speaking. And they’re like, What about Costa Rica, or what about Ecuador? And I knew I wanted to do direct enrollment. And that was the Ecuador program. And I was like, okay, so this is the program. This is my program. And that was honestly probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.”

Josie Czuj on Réunion Island.Her second semester abroad was in fall of 2024 at Réunion Island, an overseas department of France in the Indian Ocean. “I had already studied abroad in France when I was in high school, so I knew I didn’t want to go back to mainland France. I knew that France would still be a place I could go, that I had connections to my friends, and I didn’t feel like France was something that would be closed off to me after I graduated,” Josie said. That was what drew her to Réunion Island, which practices a dialect of French that would allow her to experience a different aspect of the French diaspora than she had on mainland France.

There were also plenty of opportunities to travel outside of her host locations while Josie was abroad. “I really like the hands-on experiential learning that the Ecuadorian university provided,” Josie said, in reference to the many field trips that were available for students to participate in. Although she did not travel through the university’s programs in Réunion, she still found plenty of opportunities to go abroad: “I did get the chance to go to Mauritius when I was in Réunion. I also went back to France from Réunion to visit my French host family,” which she stayed with during a trip to France in high school. Beyond that, she also visited two friends from Beloit who were studying in the Netherlands: “I saw them for a couple days, and I saw their location, their study abroad lives, and I met their friends there. And that was really exciting,” she said. Beyond that, she was also able to meet up with a friend she had met during her time in Ecuador who was studying abroad in Madrid, Spain at the time, which Josie visited.

Josie feels that she couldn’t have had the experiences she did in Fall 2024 if she hadn’t been abroad before: “without the first experience abroad, I definitely don’t think I would have gone to Réunion Island,” she said. Going abroad twice allowed her to build her resilience and feel able to go outside of her comfort zone and into a space that gave her opportunities to learn she never could have gotten anywhere else.

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