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An alumni reunion reminds me of who I used to be
Last month, two days before my 40th birthday, I opened an email invitation to a master’s alumni reunion. A few clicks around the message sent from my former university in the Netherlands and I was thrown back heart-first into my favorite era.
My Erasmus Mundus master’s program was, and still is, pretty special. Not only did it gather (and fund) students from six continents, but it was also a multidisciplinary degree jointly offered by four universities in Italy, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands. Every term, our cohort — most of us in our early twenties — traveled from one country to another and had to adapt to life abroad all over again, in that new foreign place.
While we learned about the brain, psycholinguistics, and language disorders in children and adults, we also unexpectedly became experts in residence permits, Italian trains, and how to blend our cultures and personalities to thrive together as we grew into our selves.
“Are you guys going?” We quickly branched off the official thread into a chat of our own, like sinking into a familiar hoodie with softened seams. Their names piled into my inbox the way they used to almost 20 years ago, long before we had smart phones and WhatsApp to discuss our exams, potlucks, and itineraries. Most of us couldn’t make…
