South America is not my thing Past Review

Academic rigor, intensity, resources, etc.

The workload was more than I expected. I was assigned about at least three hours of homework/reading daily, probably an average of four to five hours a day in reality. I did not think it was practical to think a student could go to class until 5PM (sometimes as long as 8pm), make the commute home (which can take up to one hour and a half) and then be expected to do all their homework, eat dinner with their host family and then just go straight to bed to wake up at 7Am to do it all over again? I thought the grading system was a little more lenient then the states and a lot of your grade is up to the discretion of the professor and not calculated percentages of different sections of the class.

On-site administration of your program

They are unorganized and do not give responses in a timely manner. We signed up for field trips/events on the first week of the program and were not given reminders or appropriate directions for those events until as close to two hours before the event or sometimes not at all.

How satisfied were you with your living arrangements?

I lived in one home stay for three months and then moved to another home stay for my last month in Argentina. The first home stay was horrible. My host mother did not talk to me and complained about me, acted like I was a burden, and tried to nitpick around the house to find things to charge me for. She was not flexible with schedules, e.g. if I was not home in time for dinner, she would not save any food for me. My second host family on the other hand, was fantastic and treated me like one of their own.

Argentina does not have any variety of food. Yes it is true that they have the best meat in the world, but who eats steak everyday? or at least, who can afford to eat steak everyday. The diet in argentina is pizza, empanadas, milanesa, and there is a pastry/coffee shop on every corner.

How integrated did you feel with the local culture?

If you go to Buenos Aires, make sure to save up extra money to be able to travel all around Argentina. There are beautiful landscapes over the country, and the trips that IES offers are more expensive then if you planned a trip yourself.

How well were health issues addressed during the program?

Health issues were not really an issue for me or from what I saw during the program. Safety is a big problem. I would say about half of the students in our program got robbed. I did not feel safe walking around the city.

(1 = not very easy/$200+ on food & personal expenses/week, 2.5 = $100/week, 5 = very easily/minimal cost)

I could practice spanish mainly with my host family. I spoke the most while being at my home stay. A thing that hurt me was that I hung out mainly with my other American friends from the program, so we spoke english all the time. I did have to use the language everyday to get around, buy things, etc. but there were a good size of Argentines who knew broken english.

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• Host Family

Select all that apply

• Host Family