There is a view from the Marienbrücke bridge at Neuschwanstein that I do not think I will ever fully get out of my head. Standing there, looking out at a 19th century castle framed by the Bavarian Alps, surrounded by people who two weeks earlier were strangers, after a week of factory floors and conference rooms and one of the most emotionally heavy days of my life at Dachau, something about that specific moment crystallized the entire trip for me. It was the kind of view that makes you stop trying to process everything and just exist in it for a minute.

I came into Plus3 Germany already knowing I loved to travel. London had already taught me that study abroad changes you in ways that are difficult to articulate until you are on the other side of one. But what I did not expect from this program was how much it would shift my understanding of Germany specifically, not as a tourist destination or a business case study, but as a country carrying an extraordinarily complicated history while somehow continuing to move forward with remarkable grace and intentionality.

Growing up American, I learned about World War II and the Holocaust the same way most people my age did. Repeatedly, surface level, and at a safe academic distance. Standing at Dachau changed that permanently. And then learning that BMW, a company I had spent the week admiring and researching and presenting on, operated its own concentration camp during the war, was the kind of collision between admiration and horror that does not resolve neatly. It just sits with you. It forces you to hold two true things simultaneously, that Germany has built some of the most impressive industrial and cultural institutions in the world, and that those same institutions exist in the shadow of something almost incomprehensible. Reckoning with both of those things at once is something I was not expecting to take home from this trip.

From a purely professional standpoint, the trip reinforced my interest in the financial and strategic side of large scale operations. Seeing how BMW, Audi, KUKA, and MAN each navigate electrification, Chinese competition, supply chain disruption, and sustainability commitments simultaneously gave me a much more textured understanding of what corporate strategy actually looks like when the stakes are real and the pressures are coming from every direction at once.

But honestly, what I keep coming back to most is something simpler than any of that. This trip came on the heels of a London study abroad that already gave me some of the best friendships and experiences of my life. Right now I am still in Europe, having just shown my mom London for the first time, about to go see friends from my last program who I have stayed close with ever since. Studying abroad keeps giving long after the program ends. Augsburg will do the same. The German students we worked with, the cities we walked through, the conversations we had at dinner tables and on train rides, those things do not stay in Germany.

I came here partly because my family is from Bavaria and I wanted to see where I come from. I leave having seen it, having understood it more honestly than I expected to, and having added it permanently to the list of places in the world that feel like mine.

Dankeschön, Germany. Ich komme wieder.