Talia's Academic Semester Experience in Buenos Aires

Hi, my name is Talia Girtton, and I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. I did the semester program here as well as the volunteer program. In my city, I studied music therapy at the University of Louisville, and I wanted to travel to Argentina to study music therapy here from a different cultural perspective. It was a really amazing experience. I was the only American, with a bunch of Argentinian students. There were a few people from other countries in South America, and I took five different classes. It was very challenging because I was just thrown into it. It wasn't really a program designed for international students, but I learned a ton of Spanish. I improved my vocabulary, for example technical vocabulary, and I learned a lot from the different viewpoint in psychology here, because they look at everything from a psychoanalytic perspective, which is basically the opposite of what we use in the United States. So everything I had learned, I had to kind of push aside and try to accept a new way of looking at things. This was for a semester. Afterwards I continued with the volunteer program. I worked with about 30 children, from ages 5 to 16, and I was able to arrange music therapy sessions with them. We had four different groups, and three days a week we had 30-minute sessions of music therapy, which was a really great experience for me, because I got to design everything, I got to organize everything, and I got to work with these kids in Spanish. I stayed in a shared apartment with a girl from California, a girl from Israel, and a girl from Norway. We had an international mix, and we all got along really well. We went out together, we cooked together, and it was a really good experience, in a good location, one of the nicer areas, in a really nice apartment. It was really open, with lots of windows and sunlight. The thing I love about Buenos Aires is there's always something to do. There's always something going on. One thing you should definitely do is look on Facebook, because literally every day there's something going on. I went to the International Tango Festival. I went to the Buenos Aires Blues Festival. I went to the Contemporary Dance Festival. I went to the Candombe Festival. There's just always something with music and art. I went to La Noche de los Museos, where all of the museums in the city are open free for a night, and you can just walk to all the different museums. So there's always something going on with art and culture and music. I would definitely recommend this program with Mente Argentina to other students. It's definitely more economical than other programs. One of the things I really like about Mente is they actually treat you like an adult. A lot of the other study abroad programs kind of baby you and keep you in a little bubble of Americans. They give us just the right amount of support and attention, but they also give us a lot of room to grow and explore the city.