Chapter 02
What I actually
brought home.
In twenty-six days, I traveled through seven cities in five countries: Budapest, Brno, Vienna, Munich, Geneva, Zurich, and Lyon. Each one had its own rhythm, its own food, its own way of carrying its history, and moving between them so quickly forced me to pay attention in a way I rarely do at home. This reflection is about what those places and the people I shared them with taught me.
I left for Europe with a pretty simple idea of what I hoped to get from the program: a few labs, some lectures, and maybe a good microscope photo. I came home with a much clearer sense of why medicine matters to me, not just as a career path, but as a way to pay close attention to people, places, and the tiny details that can change everything.
In Budapest, Ignaz Semmelweis stopped feeling like just a name from a textbook. Standing in the city where he proved that handwashing could save lives made his work feel more human and more frustrating, because he saw something true before the world was ready to listen. In Brno, Mendel's garden made a different point. Science can also be slow, repetitive, and patient. Counting pea plants for years is not glamorous, but it changed biology forever.
Vienna showed me the older side of medicine through preserved specimens, museums, and lecture halls where doctors learned to read disease in tissue. Munich brought that into the present with molecular diagnostics, university labs, and researchers connecting genetic information to real treatment decisions. Geneva widened the lens through the WHO and the Red Cross. Zürich reminded me how much precision matters in a lab. Lyon, especially the Pasteur Institute, tied it all back to microbes and the people who studied them carefully enough to change public health.
I came back more observant and more willing to ask questions. I also came back more sure that microbiology is not a narrow subject. It connects medicine, public health, food, research, and the way we prepare for future outbreaks. If I get the chance to return, I want to go with my own research question in mind.
Three things I learned
01Europe is not one place
Before this trip, I think I imagined 'Europe' as a single idea. The trip dismantled that quickly. Budapest felt nothing like Vienna, and neither felt like Lyon or the Swiss cities. The architecture, the pace on the street, the way people ate and gathered, even the way a city treated its river, all of it differed. I learned to slow down and notice those contrasts instead of flattening them, and that habit of attention is something I want to keep long after the trip.
02I can adapt to almost anything
With a new city every few days, I never had a home base, and at first, that was disorienting. By the second week, I had stopped waiting to feel comfortable and started working within the motion, building small routines I could carry from place to place. Learning that I can function and even enjoy life without solid ground under me felt like a quieter but genuine kind of growth.
03The things I study exist far beyond a classroom
Two stops in particular, a fermentation facility in Budapest and the World Health Organization in Geneva, connected what I learned in lectures to the wider world. Standing in those places, I understood for the first time how far the subject can reach, from food and industry to global health. It did not change my major so much as give it a horizon. I came home more curious about microbiology and antimicrobial resistance than when I left, but mostly because I had finally seen where it lives outside a textbook.
Two things I found genuinely interesting
The fermentation facility in Budapest
I tend to think of microbes as something to manage or eliminate. Here they were being deliberately cultivated and put to work, productive rather than harmful, and tied directly to the food and drink of the culture around them. It was a small thing, but it reframed how I see the organisms I study, and it connected the science to the very Hungarian experience of eating and drinking my way through the city.
The mountains
The French Alps and the ranges near Munich were unlike any landscape I had stood in before. After days of trains, museums, and crowded streets, the scale of the mountains was almost humbling, and they gave me a kind of stillness the rest of the trip rarely allowed. Those were some of the moments I felt most present, and they reminded me that immersion is not only about the famous sites but about simply being somewhere completely new.
A challenge I had to push through
The hardest part of the program was not the academics; it was the constant movement. Living out of motion, with no fixed place to return to at the end of a day, wore on my body and my focus more than I expected. What got me through it was leaning on the people around me and accepting that being a little tired and a little lost was part of the experience, not a failure of it. Looking back, that discomfort is inseparable from the growth; I would not trade it.