I Jumped Off a Mountain (don’t tell my parents)

GRIP: Engineering Research in Aachen, Germany

Cover image: Paragliding over the Swiss Alps!

At the end of my summer in Europe, I found myself standing on the edge of a mountain in Switzerland, waiting for take-off.

I remember looking down and thinking that this was probably the most literal version of “taking a leap of faith” I could have found.

When I first arrived in Aachen, I had a very different picture of what the summer would look like. In my mind, I was there for an internship, and I was genuinely excited about the research I was embarking on, but there was also a lot of uncertainty. I was living in a country I had never visited before, away from my usual routines and my comfort people. I didn’t know who I would become friends with or what I would do with my time outside of work.

In hindsight, that uncertainty ended up being one of the best parts.

Aachen’s location made it almost impossible to stay in one place. Being in the heart of Europe meant that a new country was often only a train ride away, and suddenly weekends became opportunities to explore places I had saved on my bucket list. From Amsterdam to Paris to Salzburg, I traveled to places I had only previously seen in movies or on social media. I was immersed in different cultures, tried native delicacies, and eventually found myself paragliding over the Swiss Alps.

But the travel was only a supplement. The most meaningful moments came from the people I met while abroad.

I became friends with local university students, people in the same program as me, and individuals whom I probably would never have crossed paths with anywhere else. There is something special about realizing that two people can come from completely different places, live completely different lives, and still happen to meet in the same city at the same time. Our paths happened to converge in Germany, and some of those friendships are ones I hope will continue long after we have all gone home.

The internship itself also challenged me to step outside my comfort zone. I had the opportunity to present my work in multiple settings at a demo day (where all the presentations were, in fact, in German) and at the final symposium in front of all the program participants, supervisors, and buddies. Presenting something I had spent the summer working on was a very fulfilling way to end. It was a little intimidating, but it also made me realize how much more comfortable I had become speaking about my work and sharing my passions with others.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking so much about whether I was doing the whole studying abroad experience “right” and started focusing more on actually being present.

For example, living abroad makes you notice things you would normally overlook. The way people interact, how they spend their evenings, what they consider normal, how they navigate their cities, even the little differences in everyday routines. When you experience enough of those differences, you start to realize that there isn’t really one version of “normal”. There are just different ways of living, shaped by different places and preferences.

This new realization made me more comfortable with not always knowing what to expect and more willing to approach unfamiliar situations with curiosity rather than hesitation.

That mindset is probably what I will take with me most from this summer.

Standing on that mountain, I was still nervous. I didn’t suddenly become fearless just because I had decided to go paragliding. I just had to decide that being nervous wasn’t a good enough reason not to do it.

In some ways, the same was true of my time in Aachen. Moving to a foreign country, making new friends, pursuing opportunities on my own, traveling somewhere unfamiliar, and standing in front of an auditorium full of people required some version of the same decision: take the step, even when you aren’t completely sure what comes next.

The funny thing is that jumping off the mountain was probably the easiest part.

The real leap was everything that came before it and everything that is to come in the next adventures of life.