August 16, 2015

Today is my last Sunday in the United States, and I don't think I have to tell anyone how strange of a feeling that is, after essentially being based in Raleigh, North Carolina since I was 9 years old. The past week has been a blur of saying goodbye to everyone and getting my things together at home before I get on a plane to go live in a city I’ve never actually visited.

To recap my plans, I will begin my Research Master's program in Clinical and Developmental Psychopathology at Vrije Universiteit (The Free University) in Amsterdam this fall. The program is two years long, and I leave on Tuesday August 18, at around 3pm with a flight from RDU to Washington DC, and then another flight from Washington DC to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Of course, I plan to come back, but I will probably only have the chance to do so in the summer, with the academic schedule. This means that most of you, I will see in about a year at the soonest! Classes start the first week of September, but they will be keeping us very busy until then with introduction activities, tours of the city and campus, and even a statistics test and refresher course for those of us who missed probabilities and hypothesis tests during our summer. The course is fortunately only required if you score below a certain number on the test.

This is really just an introduction post, but I am sure I will learn much more about everything new in my life in the next week or so and be able to tell all of you. That is why this blog will exist, hopefully. I know some of my friends don't use other forms of social media, so this is the most universal way to keep everyone posted on my life. I won't write every day, but I hope to make an update once or twice a week about what I am doing, who I am hanging out with, and the places that I see. I will do my best to supplement these with photographs, where applicable.  With all of that said, and my bags (almost) packed, I think I am ready for an adventure!