Before you Arrive

CYA provides you with a variety of resources to help ensure your study abroad experience is successful in every way, balancing academics with travel and social activities. These facilities and resources will allow you to make the most of your time at CYA.

To help prepare for your arrival in Athens, CYA provides personalized pre-departure guidance and many useful online tools, including webinars and video guides.

Read more about our extensive pre-departure resources here.

We’ll Introduce you to Athens

Upon arrival, CYA staff will explain everything you need to know about getting started with the academic and practical aspects of living and studying in Athens. During your first week in Greece, we’ll show you around your new neighborhood and provide you with insider tips and advice on how to get by. Students, faculty, and staff will also get to know each other in fun bonding activities.

Class of Fall ’18 introduced to the CYA experience!

As soon as you check-in, you will be given a welcome packet that contains everything you need to navigate the first week.

CYA.inAthens Intranet

CYA.inAthens is a hugely helpful resource while you are in Athens. It features announcements about events happening at CYA as well as in Athens and the rest of Greece, and it provides you with useful links to library resources, directories, schedules, emergency numbers, guides, maps, etc.

CYA Handbook – Your ‘go-to’ Guide

The CYA Student Handbook, which you will receive upon arrival, contains a wealth of information about our program and policies, health, travel, housing, safety and security. There is a section on living in Athens, which covers shopping, laundry, phones, banking, religion, and culture, and it also contains suggestions for leisure and entertainment and getting out and about.

Social Support

Simultaneously adjusting to a new culture, unfamiliar language, different academic environment, and new roommates can be daunting. However, CYA’s friendly and experienced administrative staff are committed to helping ease the transition and addressing any ongoing concerns. CYA administrators have an “open door policy”, and students should feel free to drop in for a talk at any time.

The Executive Director of Student Affairs is on hand to deal with any emotional problems (difficulties with roommates, adjustment problems, homesickness, etc.) and give you necessary encouragement and advice. In more serious cases, specialist help is also available. Indeed, CYA aims to ensure a successful and safe stay for every student by fostering an atmosphere of open communication between students and staff while simultaneously encouraging independence and a positive approach to cultural differences.

Click here to learn more about the range of free Social Advising and Academic Support services CYA offers to its students

Advice on Adjusting

Orientation and acculturation activities assist you in adjusting to life in Greece. Making this adaptation to Greek ways of life and attempting to learn the language can be simultaneously exciting and challenging, frustrating and fun.

Participating in another culture and learning to live and study in an unfamiliar environment requires patience, flexibility, an open mind, and equal doses of humor and courage. Our program offers you the opportunity to acquire a broader perspective and understanding of a highly diverse, fascinating, and proud culture; our students often come to see this learning experience as one of the most important in their lives.

The greatest achievements of studying abroad in Greece are: learning to cope with different sets of attitudes, values, and beliefs; developing the ability to see through European rather than American eyes, and persevering with and embracing the unfamiliar.