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When I think of an organized person, the first character that comes to mind is definitely not myself.
One thing I knew, however, when I first applied and was accepted to the CIMBA Study Abroad Program, was that I wanted to be prepared for the trip as best as I could.
I immediately began to organize everything you could imagine - money, supplies, packing, travel documents - the whole shebang.
Everyone has their own way of organizing. For example, my older sister made paper and pencil lists when she traveled abroad in high school. But for me, being a journalist who commonly works with numbers, I used what I already knew and what could help centralize all my lists and planning - a good spreadsheet.
I went online and found some travel templates and settled on a free one by Build Your Moxie LLC as the base and then tweaked it for my needs. From there I just filled in what I knew:
● The program is in Venice from May to June
● The program’s base cost
● Potential scholarships to apply for
● Things I knew I needed (like a passport)
The spreadsheet was created in late January, and I checked it nearly every day from then on until I departed for the program.
I updated it when I bought something specifically for the trip to help me track my expenses. However, I also filled it in when I received a scholarship notification. To make sure I never went over the budget I had, thankfully using the template I chose, one tile calculated the overall cost and if it was over or under the amount of money allotted.
While this was fantastic for budgeting and tracking my expenses, it really excelled in helping me plan for the trip when it came to supplies and packing.
There is a section of my spreadsheet dedicated to to-do lists. The sheet included a list of to-dos each month leading up to departure but also included a week out and one day out. This was the area where I was able to plan when to purchase items, where to purchase items when to contact necessary agencies regarding my travel, and when to request certain things from campus offices that awarded me scholarships.
Following that sheet came the packing document. I was able to spread out what clothes I needed, what toiletries I needed and so on which made packing super simple in the grand scheme of things. I knew what had to go in what bag thanks to my lists.
In fact, the most difficult part of my packing experience was actually nothing a spreadsheet could help me with. I was dead set on bringing my weighted dinosaur stuffed animal which is also a little large. I wanted it with me on the long plane ride, so it had to go in my personal item, and in my case, it was a backpack.
Fitting a stuffed animal in a backpack in the first place is hard but adding a weighted stuffed animal to the equation? Not a great idea.
All in all, it worked out, with a lot of help from my mom and siblings we got the dinosaur in the bag, and I made it through security swiftly.
Another thing my spreadsheet couldn’t help with for the trip here though was my own clumsiness. The one and only hiccup I had on the plane ride was dropping my left Bluetooth earbud on the floor within the first hour of the nine-hour flight from Philadelphia to Venice. I’ve decided airplane floors are an endless abyss where you can’t find anything ever.
So, my first word of advice while starting this journey abroad is to make a spreadsheet or at least start organizing in your own way early on. My second? You can only be so prepared, things are bound to go wrong, and you have to roll with it.