Gregory Dechant: Where do I fit?





Since coming home, I don’t know where I belong.  My friends have all moved on in their lives and my new friends are thousands of kilometers away.  My social support network is very important to me so reintegration has been extremely difficult.  I am waiting for classes to start, renegotiating the terms of my employment and catching up on all of my doctors’ appointments, course advisors etc etc etc. The time has been both crazy busy and super slow! I am a person that needs structure and currently none exists! But I don’t want this to all sound negative. My friends and I are reconnecting (some faster than others). Work begins again soon, and classes start back up with me entering my 4th and final year at Cap. I have maintained contact with my new friends and we are already making plans to meet again somewhere in the world! I got to visit over 20 cities in Europe, and those are just the ones I stayed overnight in, there were so many more than I was able to make short stops at or day trips to!


I say that I have had issues figuring out where I fit back in Vancouver, but thanks to social media my closest friends and I were never out of touch for long and we had no problem (mostly no problems) reconnecting at home. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything (except maybe the resulting debt, anyone want to take care of that for me? Please? No seriously PLEASE?) and I highly recommend that everyone at least tries. The full semester experience is worth the cost (please someone pay my debt) and while reintegration has been difficult for me here (but that is me I have “issues”) what I learned about myself over there is invaluable.


Gregory Dechant is a business student at Capilano University. Greg studied abroad at  SRH Hochschule Berlin in Germany.   
Location: Berlin, Germany

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