AmericanAnDerTU

Today marks four years to the day since I’ve moved to Austria (my fourth “Austroversary” - thanks Ally!). What a ride it has been thus far. In the past four years I learned the German language after not having been able to speak a word of it, restarted my university career at the Vienna University of Technology and met a lot of new people along the way. 

It’s impossible for me to try and compress this journey into a single thought, but I can sum it up in a single word: wow. Before I moved to Austria I had never lived on my own before so having to do all of that on my own and survive in a foreign country was heavy business. Thankfully I had two awesome friends to help me out and since then I’ve been able to help out others that have found themselves in a similar situation. It’s most certainly not an easy thing to do but I can say that I am proud to have done it. 

The funny thing is that during high school I never wanted to really study abroad or even leave the USA. A lot of friends talked about how they wanted to do all these things after graduation but none of them did it. It wasn’t until college in the USA that I thought about doing a semester abroad but then I saw what kinds of costs were involved and it was way too expensive for me. After two years of that and talking to my Australian friend that was living in Vienna at the time, I decided to make the move. I’d heard how cheap Austria was and I have family here so I figured I’d try it for a semester or two and learn German. Now I’ve been here for four years. Wow, right?

I remember my first day of German class perfectly. I was really nervous but also really excited. In our class we had people from Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, the Middle East - pretty much every major area of the world was represented in our class. It was exhilarating. One of the first friends I made in that class spoke only broken English and I didn’t speak her native Serbian, but it didn’t matter. What we couldn’t say in English we said in German. Wow, right? Great stuff.

After two and a half semesters of German classes I decided I was ready to take the entrance exam for the university to prove that I was fluent in German. Took the written test and scored a perfect mark and then did the oral exam and was nearly perfect there, too. I’m sorry, but I have to brag here: From over sixty students, less than thirty passed the written exam and were allowed to take the oral exam and I was the only one of them with a perfect mark. I finished up my last semester of German classes and then had a month off to prepare for my first day in a proper university class. 

I remember trying to figure out the outdated and confusing system that the university was still using at the time and had to get a friend of a friend who studied there to help me make sense of it. After that I thought I would never be able to survive - I couldn’t even figure out how the website worked! It wasn’t until after a few weeks I found out that pretty much everyone had the same problems I had, so that was nice.

My first day was a math class. For the Austrians it was boring but for me it was actually difficult stuff - I had never done math like that in high school so I had a steep learning curve in order to keep up. That was another day where I was sweating bullets I was so nervous. Most foreigners don’t manage to pass but one or two classes in their first semester at an Austrian university but I managed four - I remember getting my first passing grade back, it was a real feeling of empowerment. Took the test in German, wrote my answers in German (even though I could do it in English) and got a perfect mark. That was all the proof I needed that I wasn’t going to be giving up any time soon. 

Now I’ve been at the university since March of 2009 and I just completed another semester and I’m just over half way finished with my degree. I’ve also gotten my first internship at a large Austrian financial institute in this semester that I’ll be starting on the 4th of July (American Independence Day - ironic, right?).

The past year has been the best, though. Since I’ve gotten heavily involved with Twitter I’ve made nothing but Austrian (and the odd German here and there) friends, a feat that many expats struggle to accomplish in Vienna for some reason. Almost every aspect of my life is done in German and it’s often difficult for me to figure out the proper word in English but I know the German word instantly.

I have no idea what the future holds for me, but I can’t wait to see what I’ve got coming my way. Like I said, it’s been one helluva ride thus far and every day is a new experience. I suppose this is what it feels like to be a child, discovering something new about the world everyday. What a rush.