Marissa Holub said she had an unforgettable, life-changing experience venturing through the streets of Valencia, Spain during her summer there.

Holub, junior in psychology with a minor in Spanish, didn’t have time to take a whole semester off to study abroad. Instead, she went during the summer for a six-week program.

“I’ve always wanted to go abroad and they advertised this program where I could finish my Spanish minor if I went abroad and it seemed like a really good opportunity and it wasn’t super expensive, so I figured why not,” Holub said.

Holub said the Study Abroad Center staff was helpful. It can even help provide students with a passport photo.

Holub was one of a record 1,800 ISU students who took part in study, volunteer and service-learning abroad opportunities. More than 1,630 earned academic credit during their time abroad and 64 participated in service-learning projects, according to the Study Abroad Center.

“I think the increase of university enrollment obviously plays a part,” said Trevor Nelson, director of the Study Abroad Center.

Nelson said there has been an increase in the number of programs offered.

“I think students go to the university now with an expectation that didn’t exist 10, 20 or 30 years ago that they will study abroad,” Nelson said.

Culture is a key factor for students wanting to go abroad to become exposed to other ideas and other ways of looking at issues.

Nelson, who has been at Iowa State for almost 25 years, is originally from the United Kingdom and did his undergraduate work at Lancaster University. He studied abroad in the United States for his graduate work in Michigan. He said he had a great experience and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

“If you experience the world, you’re bound to be impacted by it and I think one thing that it does to a person is enable them to better understand the world,” Nelson said. “And interestingly, it also helps them understand not just the culture their visiting or the specific country their visiting, but also helps them understand their own culture when they return.”

Financial aid plays an important role for students attending universities and for studying abroad, Nelson said. Students remain eligible for financial aid when they go abroad.

“Financial aid was really easy to get for this and plus scholarships,” Holub said.

Holub said she would describe her study abroad experience as amazing. ISU Spanish program coordinators went on the trip and were helpful, she said. She took classes in Valencia and took six credits there, which all transferred back to Iowa State.

“I love Spain,” Holub said. “It probably was one of the best experiences of my life.”

Holub said she is now much more appreciative of other cultures and tries to make an effort to understand them. It taught her how to be independent in the way if she wanted something she could not ask for it in English. She had to figure out how to say it in Spanish.

“It definitely made me more confident in approaching natives and try to get my point across,” Holub said. “I can’t speak it fluently but I think I can definitely speak it better now than what I could when I got there.”

Going to Spain is something she said she thinks about every day and still meets with the friends she made there. There were 70 students in the program, and she made friends with 15 of them and still has relationships with most. One is even going to be her roommate next year.

Célize Christy, senior in animal science and global resources, studied abroad and did an internship this summer in Kamuli, Uganda. She applied for the program called “Creating a School Garden” service learning program through the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, a program that selected only eight students.

Christy said this opportunity was different because by traveling to Uganda and working with the people within the community, the group impacted locals’ lives.

Christy had to take a course before she went to learn about the culture, so she could learn what they would do and about the language and requirements needed before they got there.

The program she went through was a service-learning program with the goal of benefitting the school lunch program within two primary schools in the Kamuli district.

The group of ISU students worked on various projects such as irrigation, agro-forestry, nutrition and health, nutrition education and poultry. The school garden, which was established to grow crops to be used for school lunches, was greatly affected by the projects. When the program started in 2006, the school lunch gave children 50 calories. Now the school lunch has increased to about 800 to 900 calories.

“It kind of reinsures on what your doing is great,” Christy said.

Christy said as a person living in the U.S., you hear about poverty and people who are malnourished, and then you hear about people donating, but you never get to see where your causes are going to. When the money gets to the other side, you never see where it’s going or whom it’s impacting.

“Going to Uganda and being immediately immersed in the community and being with people every single day that are from there and being with the children, you really see what they’re talking about and that people are impoverished. You get to see what hungry and malnourished looks like,” Christy said.

Christy said this experience is different from any other study abroad. They get paired with students from a Uganda university. They are not only working with the mother and children but also working alongside university students who are studying in Uganda.

“Ever since I’ve studied abroad I’ve been encouraging students to go especially somewhere they’ve never been or somewhere they’ve been dying to go. Prepare yourself [to] ask questions … definitely come back with a new site and a new view of things,” Christy said. “Studying abroad is just awesome.”

Christy will go to Rome, Italy and back to Uganda this summer. She has applied for the dean’s leadership in food agricultural program. Rome is the headquarters for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.