Juniors Cara Williams and Kaori Nicole Clemmer traveled to Australia last semester as a part of Milligan’s Semester Abroad program. They chose to participate in the program in order to fulfill the capstone requirement for Milligan’s Honors Program.
Williams and Clemmer traveled to Carindale, Australia, to attend Christian Heritage College, where they attended classes alongside other students from abroad as well as native Australian students. The classes they attended were part of the social sciences curriculum at CHC, which included philosophy classes and an anthropology course on the culture of Australia’s indigenous people, the Aborigines.
“In our Aboriginal class, you take a lot of trips,” Williams said. “They take you to smoking ceremonies, lands that are important to the Aboriginal people and historical sites.”
Other classes they took included a “Theology of counseling” class, which they took alongside the traditional Australian students at CHC.
Clemmer noted that there was a significant age gap between the usual American student and the students they attended classes with at CHC, saying, “Cara and I were the youngest by 8 years at least. The oldest person in there was around 50.”
With classes meeting only once a week for 3-4 hours, Clemmer and Williams had plenty of time to explore their new surroundings.
“I swam the great barrier reef,” Williams said. “I held a koala, I pet some kangaroos. We spent a lot of time at the beaches.”
Clemmer recounted a story in which she, Williams and a group of other students in the study abroad program traveled to Cairns, Australia, for spring break.
“We flew in around midnight, and we realized we had made a mistake and booked a hostel for the next night, which meant we couldn’t check in for the day until 10 a.m.,” Clemmer said. “We looked so pitiful with our bags as we tried to find a place to sleep… So we picked a pretty secluded playground with a canopy-type flat, and put our bags down to sleep a little. It wasn’t the best and most convenient night, but it’s a great story to tell!”
Clemmer and Williams both said they enjoyed their time in Australia, both for the academics and the extracurricular experiences.
“I was stressed,” Clemmer said, “but it was memorable because I was stressed alongside other people from my class. So we all grew from that together.”
Milligan’s semester abroad program is partnered with Best Semester, an international network of Christian colleges designed to help students seeking to study abroad. To learn more about Milligan’s semester abroad programs or to apply to study abroad yourself, contact Administrative Assistant for Academic Affairs Tara Dugger.