Everything I wanted it to be Past Review

Academic rigor, intensity, resources, etc.

AIT was rigorous enough for me not to get bored, but not so rigorous that I had to stay in the city all the time to get my work done, which was the ideal study abroad experience I think. There were some weeks when I spent hours and hours at the school working, and others when I didn't spend a minute more than class attendance required, but those weeks were pretty easy to predict, because all the professors gave out syllabi at the beginning of the semester and stuck to them pretty well.

On-site administration of your program

Our administrators were great! Never had a problem with any of them, and never had a problem they couldn't help me fix.

How satisfied were you with your living arrangements?

I liked living in an apartment, and I liked my roommates, but I would have liked a more even pan-to-lid ratio :/

There's plenty of opportunity for good food in Budapest (and it's all cheap!) but don't expect this to be Rome or Paris. Hungarian cuisine is mostly just pork and potatoes. I made most of what I ate myself, and had a reasonably easy time getting what I needed to cook at the local grocery stores and markets.

How integrated did you feel with the local culture?

Because we didn't directly enroll in a Hungarian university, we really had to actively put ourselves out there in order to integrate with locals. It didn't help that I only spoke three weeks' study worth of Hungarian. That said, i loved getting to know the other students, including the few who were locals.

How well were health issues addressed during the program?

I didn't interact with the Hungarian health care system at all because of the horror stories. Unfortunately this means I still need to get my flu shot this year :(

Budapest is about as safe as any city, but it's good to keep in mind that cultural attitudes about women are less than strictly friendly. I only had one incident all semester that made me feel unsafe, which happened when I was walking home at night with my friends and two guys came up behind us and smacked my butt - twice. Yelling at them eventually made them go away. I do appreciate that guns are so rare in Hungary that I never had to worry about that the way I do in the US, so snaps. Advice to future students: pretty much the same as usual. Walk with friends. Learn how to tell someone to go away in Hungarian. Oh, and if someone is staring at you on the bus, it's probably nothing. Hungarians just really like to stare.

I had so much fun, learned so much, made great friends. It definitely helped that I went to the language crash course before the semester started, and I was really lucky that I ended up with roommates who would become great friends. As the semester drew to a close, even though I was ready to go home and see my cat and feel warm weather, I wished it wasn't ending.

(1 = not very easy/$200+ on food & personal expenses/week, 2.5 = $100/week, 5 = very easily/minimal cost)

^labeling is not clear at all on this scale (which end is 1?) so I'll put my rating here as well: 4 or 4.5, definitely. Budapest is about as inexpensive as Europe gets, especially if you cook for yourself. Public transport cost less for the whole month (with a student ID) than it did for three days in Rome.

0 = No encouragement, 5 = frequent encouragement to use the language

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• Apartment

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• Americans
• International Students

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• Local Students
• Americans
• International Students

• The city
• The other students
• The language crash course

• More lids for the pots and pans in my apartment
• More glasses and cups too. Too many mugs and shotglasses, not enough water cups
• Make some effort to equalize apartment situations: some students I know got stuck with a mini-fridge to share between three roommates, plus no oven. That's a very challenging cooking situation.

The Academic or Linguist