My Journey at Wesleyan University
My Journey at Wesleyan University
April 28, 2025 I didn’t expect to become a beach person. When I was a child, every winter my family drove down to Florida, and I despised the idea of going. I’ve never felt drawn to the idea of lying around in the sun, doing nothing while being sticky with sweat and surrounded by other people. But in Florianópolis, Brazil, …
August 1, 2021 Raised by parents who emigrated from Poland as the Communist regime collapsed, learning English was a challenge for me. I grew up immersed in Polish culture and called Chicago’s thriving Polish community my home. With non-English speaking parents, my only hope of learning the language was through VHS tapes and later my older sister when she entered …
March 15, 2025 The first month of my study abroad experience in Brazil was marked by silence and isolation. Although I was beyond excited to go, my timidness held me back, and the overwhelming cultural differences left me feeling out of place and detached. Every day felt like a challenge. I was navigating a new language, a new routine, and …
October 28, 2024 The first and only time I went to northern Brazil was for a field trip to the city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia, with other students from the Brazil Middlebury Schools Abroad program. It was around noon, and the sun burned everyone and everything in its path. I was immensely grateful to be on this …
This piece in Italian is a personal reflection on identity, faith, and migration, told through the imagined question: Who would I have been if I had been born somewhere else? It traces my family’s journey across three countries, Poland, Israel, and the United States, and explores how each place, and under each “sun,” brought different forms of hope and hardship. …
This reflection is about how how language connects to identity and culture. In Piller’s reading, we learn how language shapes the way people think and live, and how misunderstanding it can lead to harm. October 28, 2022 I notice that the way I speak changes when I switch to Polish. Certain concepts feel more natural to express in Polish, especially …
This reflection was written in response to Sorrells‘ Opening the Conversation. The reading introduces key concepts in intercultural communication, including how culture is shaped by power, history, and global systems. Sorrells challenges the idea of culture as fixed and instead presents it as something dynamic, contested, and influenced by structures like colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. There are two reflections, one …
For this assignment, we were asked to choose an intercultural hero. It is dedicated to someone who embodies empathy, resilience, and the ability to navigate across cultural boundaries with awareness and compassion. I chose Igiaba Scego, an Italian-Somali author, activist, and journalist whose work explores identity, belonging, and marginalization in Italy. October 2, 2022 Igiaba Scego is an Italian-Somali (italo-somala) …
