When I was leaving HKUST, I was unsure how I would “go back to normal” as it were, and re-adjust to being in the US again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out to be easier than I thought. That is one of the things I think I gained from studying abroad and travelling around, I feel like I gained some ability to adjust to new situations a bit quicker. I honestly haven’t reflected on my time at HKUST too much yet, since I’ve been busy getting ready for the quarter, seeing family, and figuring out my plans for after I graduate. I know for sure that I really enjoyed my time in Hong Kong and travelling around Japan, Thailand, and China, and that I met some really cool people, had some great food, and took an absurd number of pictures that I need to sort through. However, perhaps because I want to assign some meaning to my time there, I feel like I also gained some kind of perspective during my time abroad.
Outside of the obvious perspective-broadening one can get from talking to people from different countries about their views on various topics from pizza to gun rights to the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, I feel like I learned a little bit about myself, to be super cliche. I certainly wasn’t going to HKUST to do any soul-searching or anything, but when I got there and experienced living in another country, meeting new people, and having a lot of the things I take for granted being completely different (you can’t get pizza delivery in Hong Kong after 11 PM as far as I could tell, I know, an earth-shattering paradigm shift). I had to re-examine some of my thoughts and opinions. I’m not sure I really changed my mind on anything too substantial, but the process of examining things was valuable in itself, or so I’m telling myself (literally, I’m not convinced that this blog is being read by enough people to qualify it as anything other than a diary).
I’m not sure if being abroad was necessary for this process, though it definitely made it more fun and interesting, and I now want to travel much more. I think that it’s easy for me to kind of feel like I’m on a track, like, gotta get through midterm week, finals week, this quarter, my time at Northwestern, my education as a whole, and then I can kind of be off this track. I know it’s not really true, and I really enjoy my time at Northwestern (though I can’t say the same for some finals weeks), and I’m incredibly privileged to have that kind of track obviously, but at the same time I kind of wanted a break from that, and studying abroad let me do that. As a result, I feel like I’m ready to embrace life at Northwestern again for the few months I have left. It has also helped me to deal with the anxiety/sadness that come with knowing that I’m going to graduate from Northwestern this year. I’m incredibly grateful that I got the chance to study abroad at HKUST, even though I realize I haven’t actually talked much about Hong Kong or HKUST in this post, but I highly recommend studying abroad for whatever reason to those with the opportunity to do it.
Me deeply contemplating life after being up for 24 hours in Japan.
Me thinking about the philosophy of Bruce Lee outside of the Hong Kong Heritage museum