Why I'm Here An Introduction

This post is to answer why I'm 8361.861 miles away from home, and what led me here to the beautiful city of Ifakara, Tanzania. I will try to sum up how I decided on living here in Ifakara for the next six months of my life in a few paragraphs, but this decision took me almost a year to make. I had many factors that were playing into this decision and just as many other places I was considering spending my second semester of junior year at. Now that I’m finally here, I am thankful I put as much time as I did into deciding where to go and am excited to say Tanzania has exceeded my expectations already within the first few days.

Back home I worked a part of a lab that creates a natural gas forecasting application which is sold by Marquette University to utilities across the US. The GasDay lab employs students from all over the world, and through the lab I was able to meet and befriend many people that spoke English as either their second or third language. Two of these students in particular were from Tanzania and I was able to learn about their home and what led them to work towards gaining their masters or PHD at Marquette. Back home in Tanzania, these students were a part of a health institute that combated the deadly diseases found in Tanzania’s cities and villages. Specifically, Malaria was one of their main areas of concentration. I knew very little about Malaria when I first met them, however through these two students I was able to learn overtime what research they were conducting and how that involved Malaria. I hadn’t considered the possibility of getting involved in their area of work until I began thinking about studying abroad.

I knew I wanted to study abroad even before entering college but had no idea where. I wanted to go somewhere new, fun, and culturally different but also presented an opportunity to work and gain experience in my field of Computer Science. I believe I am the third Computer Science student to study abroad at Marquette University, which meant it was more difficult to fit these six months into my school schedule than I had originally thought it would be. I spoke about what I was looking for in a study abroad destination with one of my mentors at the university and he brought up the point that I had many connections to labs across the world via my peers who I worked with at GasDay. One connection in particular seemed like it held the opportunity I had been describing and I realized that I could most likely find what I was looking for in Ifakara.

Fast forward to January 16th, 2017 and I’m on a plane headed to Ifakara, Tanzania to carry out research and the promotion of the ongoing projects at the Ifakara Health Institute. I was under the impression I would be working on some web development for the institute, but after being here a week I was excited to learn I will be working on much more than that. Keep up with my blog posts to find what I’ve been up to.

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