"There is something powerful about temporarily stepping outside the reality you know. The things that once seemed inevitable suddenly become choices. Distance quiets some of the noise around you, and in that quiet, you can begin distinguishing between what you genuinely want and what you have simply learned to want."
I arrived in Paris expecting to leave with answers. Instead, I left with more questions.
Before studying abroad, I had become comfortable with a particular vision of my future. At Columbia, and in New York more broadly, it can sometimes feel as though you are standing at the center of the world. There is a constant pressure to keep moving forward, to pursue the next internship, opportunity, accomplishment, or carefully constructed version of success. Somewhere in that momentum, I think I stopped asking myself a very simple question: Why?
Paris gave me the space to ask it again.
Studying Art Humanities abroad meant that learning extended far beyond the classroom. The paintings and buildings I studied were no longer confined to lecture slides. I could encounter them in museums, churches,
streets, and neighborhoods, sometimes only hours after discussing them in class. But unexpectedly, studying art also made me wonder about possibilities for my own life that I had never seriously entertained. What if I learned French? What if I lived outside the United States for a few years? What if I moved to Paris? What if I worked in the art world? What if there are passions I have yet to discover simply because I have never given myself the opportunity to find them?
Those questions may sound small, but to me, they represent one of the greatest gifts studying abroad gave me: permission to imagine my life differently.
There is something powerful about temporarily stepping outside the reality you know. The things that once seemed inevitable suddenly become choices. Distance quiets some of the noise around you, and in that quiet, you can begin distinguishing between what you genuinely want and what you have simply learned to want.
I watched people linger over meals, sit in gardens, wander through museums, and make space for beauty in
ordinary life. I began to understand that ambition does not have to disappear in order for life to slow down. There are different ways to live meaningfully, different places to call home, and perhaps even different versions of ourselves waiting to be discovered.
The GLS gave me the opportunity to experience that distance. Without its support, studying in Paris would have been impossible for me. Because of it, I was able not only to study the art and architecture I had spent years learning about, but also to encounter another way of living and thinking about the world.
Paris shook my world in a beautiful way, although perhaps not by giving me a new plan for my life. Instead, it reminded me that I did not have to follow the one I already had.
I left Paris less certain about my future than when I arrived, and I am grateful for that. I hope I never stop asking myself the questions Paris taught me to ask:
What if? Why not? What else could my life become?
