The stillness is what junior nursing student Anya London remembers the most about her time at Monash University. Located in Clayton, a suburb 20 minutes down Motorway 1 from the bustling city of Melbourne, Monash offered a quiet, subdued respite from the chaos of a city.
“I feel like downtowns in America are chaotic and you hear so much honking of car horns,” London says. “I just felt very at peace when I was there.”
Each fall, a group of Marquette nursing students takes the nearly 10,000-mile journey to Australia for a semester-long study abroad experience. It is a chance most in their profession do not get — many nursing schools have clinical and academic requirements that prevent students who go abroad from graduating on time.
“I wanted to live in a place and fully immerse myself instead of just going to visit. You don’t get the same experience when you’re just passing through.”
Bella Philbin, junior nursing student
Marquette Nursing works with Monash to ensure students can get course credit toward their major. London and her friends took classes in pediatrics, maternity and even palliative care. They also got to see how academics in Australia differed from those in America.
“It’s a flipped classroom; you’d read everything and learn all the material outside of class, and you’re doing a lot more presentations and groupwork in class,” London says. “There were also a lot more papers than tests, which I thought was interesting.”
“It’s very laid back and they seem like they pay close attention to how much stress is on the students,” said fellow nursing junior Bella Philbin. “There was this whole culture of enjoying life down there; there weren’t nearly as many exams as back home.”
While the students did not proceed with clinical rotations in the same way they would at Marquette, they did get an up-close look at the Australian health care system in other ways. London and her friends sat in with upper-level graduate students as they went through nursing simulations. They also took a tour of a local hospital, meeting with nursing managers of each floor and doing walkthroughs of multiple units.
There would be plenty of time for deep engagement with patients when they got back home, though. This semester was about deep engagement with the culture.
“I wanted to live in a place and fully immerse myself instead of just going to visit. You don’t get the same experience when you’re just passing through,” Philbin says.
“Australia is far away from the United States and a country that is a little less accessible in terms of traveling,” says Bella McDonagh, another student on the trip. “I saw this as an opportunity to go and do something that I probably wouldn’t have done later in my life.”
Such immersion demands that college kids do all the things one might expect them to do in Australia: get scuba certified, visit the Great Barrier Reef and explore Melbourne in their spare time. London recalls how fun it was for the group to act like they lived there. McDonagh commented that Melbourne’s tram system reminded her of the cable cars in San Francisco, her hometown.
London’s parents had visited Australia two decades prior and hosted five different exchange students during her childhood. Over her time abroad, London was part of a different group of five: the group of fellow Marquette students she traveled with to the reef and to Tasmania. Those newfound friendships returned with her to Milwaukee, the most enduring part of her semester down under.
“Being close with them made the semester super fun and travel really easy,” London says. “The fact that all the people I got to bond with are back here at Marquette is just so cool.”
