When it comes to taking advice about my future and college, one of the biggest things that I hear is that studying abroad in college is one of the best decisions I can make.

Whether you do it by taking a gap year and study abroad for fun or you take classes at a college and work on your major, I have only ever heard amazing things from people.

Deciding to put themselves in situations where they go outside of their everyday life and interact with new people and a new culture, often in a place where they don’t speak the same language, is nothing short of exciting.

When I went to Europe for two weeks, I was uncomfortable just visiting different cities where I didn't speak the language, even though I was surrounded by people I knew and went to school with regularly.

One of my closest friends this year is a foreign exchange student at my school. She’s from Belgium and speaks fluent French and English.

Although I consider myself relatively good at French, I don’t speakit very well at all. I can read, write and understand it, but if you ask me to speak it, I suddenly blank on everything I’ve learned from the past four years.

Granted, my friend has been studying English as a second language for way longer than I've been studying French. However, I still find it super cool that she can speak both really well.

One of the reasons we became such good friends was because my French teacher told me about her over the summer. When I first found out that there would be a student from Belgium at my school, I was really excited to meet her and I wanted to be friends.

The very first time we met in my school cafeteria, we talked about exchanging and how her first few weeks in America had been. Since I had visited Europe that summer, we talked about traveling and our different experiences.

If I had never decided to take French in high school, I probably would’ve never known that Sarah was coming to my school and I wouldn’t have met one of my closest friends.

Now, I know that I definitely want to study French in the future, become better at it and hopefully study in France when I'm in college.

Deciding to learn another language has opened up so many opportunities, and it has caused me to meet so many people and have experiences that I would’ve never been able to handle had I not began studying it when I did.