Summer plans

Getting ready to leave for Spain

Aaah!! I can’t believe that I only have three days of classes left. I’m definitely not ready for this school year to be over. The semester has flown by, and with the weather getting nicer, I can’t think of anywhere I would rather be than Chapel Hill. Fortunately I don’t have to leave after exams!! UNC and the surrounding offer a number of summer opportunities for students like me who never want to leave.

First summer session I am taking a Spanish class to make sure that my Spanish doesn’t get too rusty before I leave for Spain in August. The class is approximately six weeks long and meets five days a week. I will receive regular UNC credit hours for it, and the grade will be factored into my GPA. During the second summer session, I will have the opportunity to revisit the summers of my youth (ha ha, my younger youth) as I am going to baby-sit for two children who spend their summers swimming, looking for animals in the backyard, and playing make-believe games.

I am going to be studying in Seville, Spain for the entire fall semester of next year, and I started to get nervous about not seeing my UNC friends for four whole months. I realized that a lot of my friends were going to be in Chapel Hill for at least one summer session, so staying here seemed to make more sense than heading back to Buffalo. Everyone I’ve talked to about summer in Chapel Hill says that it is an absolute blast! There are a lot of people here for school or summer jobs but everything is a little bit more laid back than during the regular school year and you meet students with whom, for any number of reasons, you may not necessarily come into contact during the regular academic year. I plan to take the next two and a half months to enjoy being here without all the pressures of school work and take advantage of being able to do things like reading in the quad on nice days and running the trails around campus.

I was very excited to learn that a couple of my friends who always claim to be too busy to visit me during the year are going to come down this summer, so I will have plenty of opportunity to show off the school and the town!! After July, I will head up to Buffalo and spend my final three weeks of summer hanging out with family and friends on the Canadian lakeshore and getting ready to leave for Spain!