Hello everyone, I’m Elisa from group #1 covid-19 and today I would like to share with you what the Virtual Study Abroad Exchange project has meant to me.

At first, I thought about joining the program because of how difficult it has become to find an internship in a physical business and for the opportunity to use Japanese everyday other than for classes. In addition, as an off-site student, the pandemic has left me alone, hundreds of kilometers away from my friends and loved ones and I really felt a lack in social communication: I wanted to talk to someone, no matter in what language.

I initially felt awkward and uneasy during the meetings and even while writing messages in Slack. I’m shy and it had been around one year since I had actually spoken to someone in Japanese because of the pandemic breakout, but I quickly found myself surrounded by amazing participants and students in the 自由会話 classes that seemed to have my same insecurities. Despite that, they were also motivated to try their best and that pushed me to try to interact more with everyone. The language level differences were scary too, but everyone was kind and patient to the point that asking for the meaning of worlds or to rephrase some concepts became more stimulating than embarrassing. This made me gain an incredible amount of confidence and now I barely feel stressed out when I realize I make mistakes. At the same time, I’ve become conscious about what skills I lack and what I can do to improve my weaknesses in a positive and constructive way, not in the demeaning “I’m too bad at this” I used to tell myself.

From the point of view of the themes, I was grateful to have entered to covid-19 channel because of a personal interest of mine, but the other topics were interesting as well. They’re not the kind of arguments you would talk about on a daily basis, but are definitely part of today’s society. They made me think more about problems I already knew existed and, in addition, made me realize that, as a society, we need to discuss more about these issues. Just knowing they exist is not enough. Not only that, but having many people to exchange opinions with, even from other countries, made me more open-minded and informed on how these problems may be perceived in different cultures. 

To finish, I would just like to thank everyone for giving me the chance to take part in the project, to everyone that participated and to all the students and teachers that worked with us too. It was not easy at all, but the satisfaction I got from these weeks has always been bigger than the struggles and that is thanks to the dedication of everyone. I hope to see you all soon in the next session of this project.

Until then, be well and stay safe.

ありがとうございました！