I first saw Brooke’s name in an email in August of 2022. I had been waiting all summer to get my assigned roommate for my freshman year, and finally, the day had come. She reached out over text and once I finished my work shift we talked on the phone for hours about our time in high school, our families, what we were nervous about in college, and most importantly, how we would decorate our dorm room!
Brooke has stayed one of my closest friends since that phone call and our time as roommates in freshman year, but she’s had a very different college experience to me in many ways. One of the most notable was her semester abroad in Switzerland in the spring of our junior year. I really enjoyed taking the chance to sit down and get the details about what her experience studying abroad was like.
She spent the semester in Geneva doing the SIT Switzerland international relations and multilateral diplomacy program. The location was really crucial to the program because it meant the group was able to go to UN and WTO, Red Cross museum, and environmental program stuff UNEP.
She lived in a tiny town that was close to Geneva and a fifty-minute public transit commute away in an apartment with a roommate and host family. Her host parents were really amazing and very Swiss! They both spoke a lot of different languages but spoke French at home. Her host dad was born in Zurich but to an Italian family, so there was a lot of Italian food and swiss food.
On a typical day, Brooke told me she would wake up and have yogurt and granola, ovalmaltine special swiss chocolate spread for breakfast. She would then walk to the bus with her roommate, Hannah, and head into Geneva for classes. I’ve always known Brooke to be a big public transit fan, and she loved the Swiss trains! The program gave them free transit on trains around Switzerland which made a huge difference for the semester because the country is so expensive.
Brooke had class every day in the program building. The classes focused on international relations. During the lunch break she go buy lunch Lebanese or Syrian food. She would also sometimes go to Manor, which is a department store with a nice cafeteria. Two days a week she had French class in a different town which was closer to home.
After classes she would head home and go on a run around the Swiss countryside to enjoy the fresh air. Brooke also went swimming one day a week at the local pool. Dinner with her host family was always at exactly 7pm, and they would have a long dinner. She would sometimes do work after, or read and do trip planning.
During the last month of the semester there were no classes, the students were given time to work on their independent study project. All the students spent the time devoted to their own project, doing interviews and writing up a paper to present. It was also a great opportunity to travel and explore Europe, though! Brooke’s project focused on the emotional dynamics of China’s EU foreign policy. She looked into whether emotions like humiliation or pride can be seen in the way that China’s foreign policy/diplomats conduct themselves.
I asked Brooke if she came to college with a clear study abroad plan and she said she really didn’t, which surprised me. Brooke is a real planner, and I felt like I had remembered her talking about study abroad back in freshman year. But then she started talking about the trip to Stockholm and Copenhagen she, our other friend and I went on over freshman spring break, and how much it convinced her that she really wanted to study abroad! She did a bunch of research that semester because she wanted to do a French program but didn’t want to do a direct enroll (where you are enrolled in classes at a university in the country directly). She eventually found this program in Switzerland, which was the only program she could find where she could take French classes and take other classes in English. The topics are also super relevant for her as a PPE (philosophy, political science, and economics) major. She applied in sophomore spring and over the summer, and by beginning of junior fall, she knew what she was doing for study abroad!
I also asked Brooke about visiting other swatties while she was abroad. I knew she had traveled around a lot while she was in Europe, and she talked about how she toured around to visit friends in their various locations. She visited a friend in Copenhagen at a home stay, another in Parma, Italy also at a home stay, and another friend visited her in Switzerland whom she also visited in Spain. She said it was really fun to trade off and see each person’s experience. Her mom also came and visited for two weeks and they travelled around Switzerland together, which was super fun. Her favorite abroad trip was long weekend trip to Athens with study abroad friends. Classic Brooke, they found the cheapest flight out of Zürich and went with it, and it turned out to be her favorite trip of the semester!
The thing Brooke talked about missing most while she was abroad was the intellectual nature of Swarthmore students. She said there were lots of people in her program who were a little less interested in talking about academics and interesting side quests than she’s found here at Swat. She found people who were and are friends, but it made her especially grateful for her community at Swarthmore, as well as the opportunities Swarthmore grants to students. To end on a Brooke quote, “Cherish the good people of Swarthmore college! They’re very special!”
