This morning I got up in the dark, ate a breakfast of rice and horse meat that I washed down with cold tea, threw on my winter coat, scrambled to collect a scarf, beanie and gloves from various corners of my room and rushed out of our building to catch the 63 bus that would take me to KazNU’s (Kazakhstan National University) Almaty campus. It’s safe to say that if, as a junior at UCLA struggling with the cyrillic alphabet during Russian 1, I was pressed to predict where I would be in three years time, Alamaty, Kazakhstan would not have come up in that conversation.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most exposure I had to Russian language consisted of resenting our Russian neighbors for always parking their car in front of our house. However, after a quarter of being enthralled by UCLA History professor Arch Getty’s rendition of post-revolution Soviet history, I decided to enroll in a Russian language course the next year with the intent of obtaining a Russian Studies minor to supplement my Political Science major.

With this fateful step, I set off on the path to where I sit writing this article halfway around the world — somewhere in between I fell in love with Russian, made it my second major, enrolled in UCLA’s Language Flagship Program and set my sights on topping off my collegiate career with a capstone year in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Every academic year American Councils for International Education sends a group of approximately 20 American students to St. Petersburg. The goal of each student is to achieve a professional level of fluency in Russian through complete immersion. Last year I simultaneously applied to this program and a scholarship to fund my anticipated participation — the Boren Scholarship for International Education. I was fortunate enough to both be accepted into the capstone year program and selected as a 2014–15 Boren Scholarship recipient, wonderful news that enabled me to finish my last year at UCLA in high spirits.

I had just moved back home to prepare for my nine-month sojourn to St. Petersburg when, two weeks to the day before I was supposed to board a plane to DC, I received an email informing me that I would instead be spending my highly anticipated year abroad in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The volatile combination of short notice, my fascination with St. Petersburg and complete lack of knowledge about all things Kazakh made this change extremely difficult to stomach.

I required a couple days to manage to gain some perspective, but eventually I came to the conclusion that the main reasons I wanted to spend a year in St. Petersburg were not city-specific; I realized that a unique cultural experience, language immersion, and the opportunity to learn more about myself and the world around me would all be available in Kazakhstan, perhaps to an even greater degree. With these three pillars in mind, I arrived in Almaty with an openness that, as the case in any study abroad experience, would prove to be essential.

Diving head first into a foreign country with a foreign culture where the people prefer to speak a foreign language (Kazakh) and will condescend to speak a slightly less foreign language (Russian) leads to one very quickly becoming comfortable with discomfort. The simplest situations in stores or on the bus are suddenly exponentially more complicated because of the language and cultural barriers. Conversely, the success of explaining to a bouncer that your “Tom Cruise from Risky Business” Halloween costume is, in fact, a Halloween costume, becomes that much sweeter.

Additionally, the effort that goes into surviving a typical weekday of four hours of language classes, individual tutoring, two hours of lecture, dombra (a long-necked lute) lessons, a gym visit and making it home in sub-freezing temperatures (the hardest part for a California boy) provides an unparalleled sense of satisfaction by the time the lights go out at night.

When everyday life is this rewarding, the extraordinary days instantly become distinct memories — I don’t think I’ll ever forget my “authentic” Kazakh day that included driving to the mountains, horseback riding, helping to slaughter a sheep for dinner later that evening, collecting apples (Almaty’s former name, Alma-Ata, translates to “Father of Apples”), relaxing in a banya, and eating the aforementioned sheep in a yurt.

Studying abroad is an invaluable experience because it engenders in you the capacity and the confidence to deal with almost any situation. Adapting to a new culture and lifestyle encourages a simultaneous reevaluation of one’s native culture, interactions and relationships — in all, the development of a unique perspective that study abroad enables.

I’m hoping that the reputation of the Boren Scholarship, my language capabilities, and firsthand cultural experience will enable me to realize my professional goals both in the immediate future and for years to come. However, regardless of what may be, I’m already convinced that deciding to study abroad for a year in Kazakhstan is one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life thus far.

>> For more information about Kazakhstan and Central Asia, please visit the UCLA Program on Central Asia, the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, or the UCLA Asia Institute

>> For more information about the UCLA Russian Flagship Program, click here