Holly is now 4 months into her Ollerup Scholarship in Denmark and has given us an update on how she is getting on and what the experience has been like so far.
“I am still loving it here at Ollerup! I have made so many new friends and have already been given a number of opportunities. This experience has already made me a better person I believe, an example of this would be that I have had to deal with things by myself and have had to make choices for myself.
They keep saying that here at Ollerup they want to prepare their students for the future. I believe that they are succeeding at this statement. The teachers here are awesome at encouraging and motivating you to become the best person you can be, and achieve the skills and dreams in life that you want to achieve. They want to teach people about the real world and how to it works.
I have chosen my line activity to be TeamGym. For me, everything is new. I have never participated in TeamGym or Performance Gymnastics before. The warm-up is different, even the drills for skills are different, this is good as I can bring back new ideas to my Club.
This semester we are focusing on our skills and how to improve them to become a better TeamGym team. We have four line classes a week, each focusing on different aspects of TeamGym – front tumbling, back tumbling, trampet and rhythmical.
There are a lot of really talented people here at Ollerup, and especially in the TeamGym line. This made me rather nervous to show my skills, as I can’t do much anymore. I was intimidated a little bit by their skill level, especially compared to mine. After the first few weeks, I realised that these people are here to learn, just like me. They are better than me, but this can be a positive thing as there are more people that are able to help me with the beginner skills. A lot of the students will offer their advice and knowledge to me as I was trying new things, especially the basic skills that they have already mastered. This instantly made me feel better and more comfortable to be in the environment. I have achieved a lot of new skills and am still working hard to achieve more skills. And the main thing is that I am having fun!
Last week, the international students went on a study trip to Copenhagen. There are 38 of us here from all over the world. Before we left, we were given a topic or tourist attraction in Copenhagen to make a presentation on. We had to do lots of research and present this to the group at some point over the week. The week went so fast and it was so much fun! This trip was a good way to get to know the other international students better. We did lots of walking, (29,600 steps most days) but unfortunately the weather wasn’t so good. It was raining most of the time, good thing we all had raincoats. I fell in love with Copenhagen so fast, it is such a beautiful place with so many tourist spots. I loved having the time to explore a new part of Denmark and to do it with so many of my new friends made it even better. To finish off the week we went to Tivoli, an experience I will treasure for forever.”
– Holly Davies – Ollerup Scholarship recipient 2017-18