Hannah Strange, the Florida Down Under marketing intern, writes:

As luck would have it, I was selected as the teaching assistant for UF’s North Queensland and Fiji programs this summer! With a week of our program already complete, today we’re venturing up to Mission Beach with high hopes of spotting an endangered cassowary.

Students participating in a field lecture

Since I studied on these programs in the summer of 2009, I have been itching to head back down under and now I am finally here again with a whole new level of anticipation and excitement. The fact that I have been rigorously promoting these programs since my 2009 participation attests to how much I believe in the power of this experience, but what am I most excited about? The answer may surprise you: the lectures.

I know, I sound crazy, I am an academic nerd and I am not ashamed to admit it. I’m genuinely most excited to refresh my memory and learn more about these breathtaking countries. Over recent months and years, people have asked me questions like ‘Hey, when was Australia colonized, what happened there?’, and I slowly have realized that I possess a basic knowledge but cannot remember as much as I would like (I have completed two degrees in the last four years; my brain was preoccupied!). But as I have been reading the module book (yes, your faculty read the module book, too), I have found myself thinking ‘oh yes, I remember, so-and-so talked to us about that; it’s really interesting.’

Snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef and the hiking through rainforests and the swimming under waterfalls and the pictures with koalas are undoubtedly really amazing experiences. However, as we continue our program, what I am looking forward to the most is learning. The people we meet will have different things to say, the places we go will look different, and for better or worse, the environment will have changed. And I couldn’t be more excited to do it all over again with new eyes!

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