Barcelona Overview

Ten weeks, three classes, two countries, eight cities, and twenty-two thousand photos. That, in a nutshell, was my summer.
Too vague?

Let me try again.
This summer, I took part in Tech’s Barcelona Summer Program, which, every year, takes a group of students and professors from Tech and drops them smack in the middle of Barcelona, Spain for the duration of the summer.

What sets this program apart is the whole aspect of “being there.” Where many programs either hop from city to city, or stay holed-up on a college campus for the duration of the summer, the crux of this program is that students live in a foreign city for a summer, learning its comings and goings and, eventually, getting to know the city as a local, instead of a tourist. The food, the housing, the transportation, and all the other trappings of everyday life are all 100% Barcelonan student.

Classes, on the other hand, are all homegrown. With the exception of two optional Spanish classes, all courses taught on the program are Georgia Tech classes taught by Georgia Tech professors. Professor Sabir Khan of the College of Architecture and Professors Frank Dellaert and Merrick Furst of the College of Computing accompanied the students this year, each teaching two classes apiece. Of these six classes, two (City Literacy, a COA special topics course, and Barcelona Leap, a CoC class on entrepreneurship) are only offered as part of the program.

One aspect of studying abroad that is often over-looked is how well you know the professors by the end of the summer. In some of the larger classes at Tech, you’re lucky if your TA, let alone your professor, even knows your name. On the other hand, after spending two months crammed in a classroom with only thirty other students, you get to know your professors—and they you—on a very personal basis. Chatting after class is one thing; having a professor offer to buy you a beer after a particularly insightful comment is another thing entirely.

This is, of course, ignoring the 800 lb gorilla in the room: the fact that you’re in Europe for over two months. No matter where you are, you can’t throw a stone without hitting some amazing church, palace, monument, club, or beach. Whether it’s spending a day climbing a mountain to get to the combination gothic church/amusement park at the top, eating spaghetti and calamari on the Grand Canal in Venice, or screaming your lungs out while watching the Euro Cup finals, there is no shortage of things to do and see in Europe. Without a shadow of a doubt, the things you do and places you see will stick with you for years to come. After all, it’s just a smidge difficult to top spying the Coliseum from the top of St. Peter’s Basilica, seeing the Sistine Chapel, then taking shelter from a hail storm in a crowd of 5000 other tourists.
Everyone always thinks of the things to see and do, but, often, the people you meet are just as interesting as anything else. Whether it was playing pool with a New Zealand lawyer motorcycling his way across Europe, sharing a plate of pork cracklings—a Castilian delicacy, apparently—with a pair of siblings from Manatoba, or discussing Woody Allen movies with a Venetian school teacher on the train into Florence, Europe seemed determined to provide me with a never-ending stream of people to meet.

Of course, many of those you’ll meet won’t understand a word you say (and vice versa), but even when the language barrier rears its ugly head, some things can quite easily be conveyed without a single common word. Standing in the center of Placa Catalunya, watching Barcelona finish an inconceivably successful season, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t speak a word of Spanish or Catalan; so long as you can throw your hands in the air and yell, “Barca!” people will cheer and dance with you all the same.

All in all: a fantastic summer from hectic beginning to utterly exhausted end. Between new experiences, new friends, unforgettable sights and people, and more of an education than you could ever get in an Atlanta classroom, my first summer as a Yellow Jacket was undoubtedly one of the best experiences of my life.