Eventually, I learned how to manage homesickness and found an amazing community of friends also dealing with the same issues. Because being so far from home felt like its own kind of extended “study abroad,” I decided not to spend a semester abroad, instead focusing on traveling around the Northeast to cities like New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.
After graduating, I moved to Baltimore, MD to be a third grade English teacher in an urban public school. It was an amazing and challenging experience that left me with more questions than answers about how education policy is made and implemented in the U.S. At the end of the school year, I decided I needed a change of pace and was feeling an itch to see more of the world when a friend told me about something called the Rotary Global Grant scholarship. She explained that it was a scholarship that would pay for a master’s degree in another country. I had never imagined actually living outside of the U.S. before, but knew I wanted to go back to school and decided to apply.
A local Rotary club in San Antonio chose me as a scholarship recipient, and in 2023 I began an MA (Master’s of Arts) in Education, Policy, & Society at King’s College London in London, England. The process of applying for a visa and moving my entire life across the ocean was daunting to say the least, but with the help of the local London Rotary club and friends I was able to travel to countries like Morocco, Northern Ireland, and France while succeeding academically.
I wasn’t quite ready to move back to the U.S. when my program finished, so I applied to and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award that allowed me to move to Vigo, Spain in the fall of 2024, where I am now!
