Carolina González is familiar with the difficulties that Florida State students who study abroad experience when they enter a new culture. She knows because she was in their situation in 1995 when, as a Spanish college student, she studied for nine months in Manchester, England. “It was the first time I was in an English-speaking country, and I was very nervous,” says González, associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at FSU. In the summer of 2018, Gonzalez taught two upper-level Spanish courses in Valencia. “So I can sympathize with FSU students who come to a country where another language is spoken.” 

González is a native of Spain, and she grew up in Muskiz, a small town near Bilbao, a Basque city in the northern part of the country. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English―called English philology in Spain―at University of Deusto in Bilbao, and during her junior year of undergraduate studies, González took the opportunity to study in Manchester. She compares the foreign exchange program called Erasmus to FSU’s International Programs.

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