Hello! Welcome to my South Africa study abroad blog!

Hallo!  I’m studying in South Africa for about 3 months with the Organization for Tropical Studies’ South African Ecology and Conservation program. I have been in love with animals from the very beginning. I always wanted to be a veterinarian growing up until I realized I wouldn’t be able to save all the animals that came to me! Now, I’m pursuing a broader avenue for saving animals in the hopes that studying conservation will save entire species and, by extension, ecosystems. I am a native of San Diego, CA and enjoyed a spoiled zoological upbringing with the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park in my backyard!  I’m hoping that studying abroad in South Africa will give me a real-world look into the problems conservationists are faced with every day and that I will gain experience working on solving those problems!  I want to work towards solutions to problems where humans are in both direct and indirect conflict with nature and use the science of the interactions between organisms and their ecosystems (ecology!) to educate people. More specifically, my true passion lies in big cats. At the risk of sounding a little nuts, cheetahs make my mouth water! I could go into my whole rant about why I love cheetahs and their dwindling numbers in the wild and humans’ role, etc. but I’ll spare you the details (for now at least!)

Now that the formal introductions are out of the way…I leave in a week and a half! It seems like it’s still six months…three months…one month away, and now it’s only days away! Going to school 3,000 miles away from home has been challenging enough, but 10,310 miles away (yes, I looked it up…) from home seems inconceivable! I pretty much have all the supplies and clothes that I need. The last two weeks I have been focusing on figuring out how I’m going to communicate with home! I seemed to have some idealistic idea that I would easily be able to call home whenever I wanted, but I’m quickly learning to come to terms with the fact that that will not be the case! It’s a tough reality to accept that, in such a technological country, I will have to relinquish my beloved cell phone and trust that email will become my best friend! Worries aside, I am so ready for the chance to visit the places I have been watching on TV my whole life (yes, I’m an Animal Planet and National Geographic addict!) and see the wild cousins of the animals I’ve seen and cared for behind bars. I know this experience will challenge me in so many ways both academically and personally, but I will come out of it a completely new person! In a few days, I’ll have pictures of all my crazy packing and the suitcase I can literally fit my entire body into…

Totsiens!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 1:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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