Penn Abroad Ambassador Rayan Jawa

Program:

• PGS: Cairo as Palimpsest

Ask me about...

• Traveling alone for the first time

• Travel and vaccine requirements

• Making connections with people while abroad

My Experience Abroad:

As a freshman, I was interested in exploring different subject areas and expanding my academic and social horizons while fulfilling course requirements. This course allowed me to complete the Writing Seminar requirement in a meaningful way, as I've been wanting to travel to Cairo since I was young. However, as the course progressed, I learned about Cairo from a modern, urban perspective, and became captivated with how social hierarchies and divisions created similar structures in the minds of Cairenes. The course became much more than learning how to write better and intersected with subject matter from my other classes and my pre-med curriculum.

Other Highlights:

• Crouching beneath the slim passageways of an Ancient Egyptian pyramid and riding camels across the dunes

• Getting food poisoning twice during the ten-day trip

• Interacting with locals in the City of the Dead and Khan el-Khalili market

• Bonding with my classmates and our Egyptian tour guide, whom we affectionately called Habibi