Experience Purdue Agriculture - Annie lee

Hi! My name is Annie Lee and I'm a senior in Food Science in the College of Agriculture. I grew up in Delaware, it's a little town on the East coast. I've always been really interested in food and coming to Purdue I knew they had a good food science program so it just helped me to broaden my interests a lot in the food science area. I decided to study abroad spring semester of my sophomore year in Ireland. At first it took a little bit of getting used to, figuring out how things worked differently. And how things maybe were perceived differently than we are used to here. As I got used to, or more adapted to the culture, made me realize that things are lot similar than what I first thought. At first I guess my parents were a little wary of the fact I was going to be gone for an entire semester. Maybe wary of the fact that I haven't been alone abroad for that extended amount of time, but I think along the way they realized that even though I'm here at Purdue now and they don't live all that far somehow the communication gets a lot more frequent when I was abroad. To get a scholarship to stduy abraod definitely meant a lot to me. Because costs are going to accumulate a lot while you are in a different setting. Europe is substantially more expensive, harder on the budget than it is here. Getting a scholarship to at least pay for the trip over there helped a lot in terms of getting my parents to agree to fund me on this experience. So that helped a lot. Thank you whoever gave me this scholarship. Before I went abroad people were telling me how great it was going to be, how exciting, how life changing, but I guess I never realized the truth behind it until I actually went over there and experienced it. There are so many benefits to studying abroad that I can't always list them all verbally because a lot of it is kind of internal and you can find out more about who you are yourself. This opportunity is pretty much only available to you now. Not many people after they get out of college will get to be in a different culture for four or five months. So I would say that if you are ever considering doing that, the best time would be to do it now. You won't get the chance to do it again.