Think back over how many different subjects you’ve taken classes in. Do you really know anything about most of those topics? I’d never claim to be an expert in math, core humanities or biology, despite having taken college courses for all of them.

But our specializations are different, right? After three years and a few 300-level classes, you’d think you would be close to proficiency in a subject, if not close to an amateur expert.

Wrong.

After spending a little more than a week in Santiago de Chile, I can tell you with absolute certainty that despite years of studying Spanish, the three-year-old cousin who spends a lot of time at my host family’s house speaks this language better than me.

Don’t get me wrong, I never thought I’d be able to just jump into this place without some language issues. But I didn’t think that I would require amazing patience from Chileans to get anything more complicated than the simplest pieces of information.

My host family and people at the university seem sympathetic and are used to foreigners, so they speak slow and tell me to just relax. Add that to the fact that Chile has one of the roughest accents in the Spanish-speaking world and I have a lot to learn here.

My point is, classroom work doesn’t cut it for truly learning these things. Even if I were a Spanish expert, I’d still get weird stares because about half the words I was taught aren’t used by anyone outside of Spain or Mexico.

You think carro or coche means car? Not here. Stick with auto. Aguacate? You must mean palta. Trying to tell your family about your novio or novia back home in the States? You’d better either be engaged or looking for the word amiguito(a).

I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. I love this place so much that if I decided to cancel my ticket home and stay forever, nobody should be surprised. But the transition to Chilean Spanish isn’t easy by any means.

Anyone who has studied a language and then gone abroad likely knows what I’m talking about here, as do people who’ve worked jobs or internships in their fields of study.
School can teach you a lot, but it doesn’t hold a candle to real-world experience. So get out there and learn a little, in addition to the mandatory experience many majors require.

Volunteer in schools if you’re an education major. Watch French movies without the subtitles if you’re a French minor. Go cut some people open if you’re a medical student — wait, actually, scratch that last one.

Step outside of campus to round out your education. You will be surprised to see how little you actually know, but it will motivate you to learn a lot more than those questions you need to answer at the end of capítulo cinco will.