For my first year seminar real time chat I met with my academic advisor. My academic advisor is Kathy Garren and her office is located in the Grange Building. I scheduled my meeting for 2:30 and arrived around 2:25 to sign in. Right at 2:30 she was ready to see me to discuss future plans to study abroad.

I decided that I wanted to get a headstart on my knowledge of studying abroad. She first showed me the website global.psu.edu which is the main source of information in regards to going abroad. As she dove deeper into the website she was pointing out the tabs that I should look into more. Earlier I mentioned to her that I was interested in doing something with fashion, so she pointed out that in some places there are programs that deal with it. 

My main parts of the world that I would want to study abroad is in Europe. I was glad to hear that you don’t necessarily need to be in the specific language to be able to travel to the country. For me I see myself either in the city of Paris, London, or maybe even Milan. 

She advised me to not stress too much thinking about it, but told me some things to keep in the back of my mind. A letter of recommendation is an example of something I could be thinking of now and creating good relationships with my professors so they could potentially write it. 

After we finished with talking about studying abroad we then talked about my plans for picking a major. As of now I am still on the fence of whether or not I want to be in the Smeal Business College or the College of Communications. I was relieved to hear that my classes for the fall set me up for whatever I end up deciding.  

Going into the meeting I was not sure how much help I would receive, but it ended up being very resourceful. The 30 minutes I was there flew by and I didn’t even notice. I already know I will be making many more trips there during my time here at Penn State.