Miami in Luxembourg

Introduction
Miami's study overseas rocks. I chose a program that Miami sponsors - an all-Miami campus in Luxembourg, Europe, and I was there just this past semester with 120 other Miami students. We lived in the city and had to take the train everyday to school.

I studied international business there. So I had 4 classes. It was a pretty unique program. It was more rigorous than a normal study abroad program because it was sponsored by Miami and they had to uphold the academics of the school to keep getting their funding. And it was awesome while I was there, I was able to travel to 12 countries, see a ton of stuff. It was really cool to be there and just every weekend we would go to a different country and meet people our age…They would always want to talk about America and what we thought about politics and stuff like that.

It was definitely an adjustment that I didn’t expect to have when I first went there. It was hard to leave and be living with a host family that you didn’t know at all, didn’t speak English. And sometimes it was little lonely, but for the most part it was a really positive experience.

Campus Life and Social Life
Miami itself is preppy but I was used to the type of kids that go here: very academic and coming from conservative, wealthy families, so it wasn’t a huge adjustment for me. Advertisement
Academics
Partying is good here - when I was a freshman, I think we’d usually just drink in the dorms and then go to a house that one of our older friends had, but we didn’t really start going to the bars until sophomore year and now that everyone’s 21 it’s fun to go to the happy hours and there’s a lot of bars right now, especially in the summer, with drink specials. They’ve renovated a lot of the bars recently and so people just like to go out and dance there’s like 4 or 5 places to go out dancing, but definitely I think the bars uptown, in general, is where the nightlife is.

Student Body
As far as fake ID’s are concerned, you definitely don’t need one, per se. It’s pretty easy to drink at the bars if you want to or just hang out. Almost all the bars are 18 and up, so you’re not restricted from hanging out with your friends. If you want to go in under, they’ll just mark some X’s on you. They’re not strict. It’s not like downtown Chicago or anything, they don’t really care that much, but I’ve had quite a few friends have their ID’s taken before.

In Closing...
I think Miami’s pretty unique. Greek life is amazing - girls in one sorority hang out with girls in 10 other sororities. Like the girls in this house, there are 6 of us and we’re all in different sororities, good friends. So I think that even though people tend to be Greek, they’re not restricted to their own Greek organizations.
If you come to Miami my advice is to get to Europe and travel - it's an unbelievable opportunity.