I'm a business major at The University of Texas preparing to graduate in May. When I started my last year at UT, I was ready to get my senior year over with and then rock it in the corporate world. I was starting my fifth internship in the fall, this time with Cultural Embrace (CE). I would get all the experiences I needed to round out my killer resume and then interview for lucrative professions all over the United States. I had the extracurriculars, the work experiences, the leadership roles, and even the study abroad component. I was good to go.
There was just one snag in my plan. As I was interning with Cultural Embrace, a large part of my duties included maintaining the CE blog. As I read about participants’ experiences in France and Australia, my heart would continually break. I would physically ache inside when I saw pictures of the participants painting with French children or when I thought about the freedom of taking a year off just to work and travel around Australia. The pain was unbearable and I missed Europe so much (I studied in Bath, England the last semester of my junior year). The thought of waiting years until another visit made me want to cry at times.
Then I had an “A-Ha!” moment. I always thought the people who took these long trips abroad had awesome jobs that allowed them to leave for months at a time and that these trips just worked with their vacation schedules. I thought once I have an awesome job that gave me months of vacations, I’d go back to Europe. It never occurred to me that I am approaching one of the best times in my life to participate in a Cultural Embrace program. I will be graduating and I don’t have any commitments to a long-term job or company or family. I could do something that I learned from the British; I could take a “gap year.” I could go abroad for an extended period of time and then come back and start a new stage of my life: fulltime work. This would make me look like a competitive and unique candidate for jobs and I'm confident that this experience would not hurt my chances of landing a great fulltime position. Being an au-pair or an English teacher in Europe would provide me with free food and housing; it's the most cost-efficient way of staying in Europe that I can think of. Suddenly I had no more excuses. I had to do it.
After that moment, my heart finally stopped breaking. I'm ready to graduate and will head off to France to live with a host family and teach them English on Cultural Embrace's France Language Exchange. I can't wait!
Tam Le
Former C.E. intern; Future C.E. Language Exchange in France participant
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