By Yosef Nemanpour
November 5th was the day my study abroad office at my home school of UCLA asked me to make my final decision of whether or not I would be spending my Spring semester at Hebrew University. Every fiber of my being wants to say it was an obvious decision because in hindsight I would never have wanted to miss this opportunity—but it simply wasn’t an easy one. In my three years of post high school education, I have attended four different institutions, and I am too well acquainted with the necessary process that accompanies a change in environment. It means making new friends, adjusting to a new schedule, a new campus, and in the case of study abroad its learning and being immersed in a new language, new currency, and a very different culture, all without the proper support one has back home. On top of all of this expected baggage that comes with studying abroad, I had not yet heard back from The Nachshon Project as to whether or not I had been accepted, and I knew that without The Nachshon Project I would not choose to voluntarily go through this relocation process again. So deciding on how to proceed with my study abroad office was simply a question of do I want to be comfortable in my institution, or do I want to get out of my comfort zone...again.
Most of my worries were thankfully cleared up the first day in Israel after arriving for The Nachshon Project orientation at the Dan Caesarea. That week my biggest worry—making new friends—was cleared completely.
Within a couple of hours at orientation, with all the fellows still jet-lagged, The Nachshon Project had organized an activity that quickly brought out each of our true colors—GIANT team building activities. Imagine small chachki brainiac puzzle games, but life-size. Other than the sheer size of the puzzles, these were not simply just your average camp ice breaker. Many of the activities were too difficult for a group of seven college students to figure out. We tried using our collective minds to figure out the solutions to the many puzzles—and often it still wasn’t enough. At times we played games with each other, at others we played games against and it was exactly this back and forth that allowed an extremely jet lagged group of people, who originally had their defensive walls up, to let go of the barriers and really just meet each other without the fake cordial smiles. The highlights of the entire night were those eudemonic moments, where the group collectively went from extremely frustrated at the task at hand to straight euphoria with just a bit of insight. It’s specifically moments like these that allow groups to form coherently.
I had the opportunity to fly in with five other Nachshon Program fellows that I had never met before, and we didn’t really speak until we had landed in Ben-Gurion Airport. I remember thinking that it would be weeks till I actually had the opportunity to open up and bond with the other fellows on Cohort 4. I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised that only after a couple hours after landing that opportunity came to me and the fellows of Cohort 4.
