They say cities are living things—breathing, pulsing, growing. If that’s true, then Chicago has a heart of water. Lake Michigan stretches beside it like a giant lung, exhaling the cool breath that keeps the city alive. I imagine myself arriving next September, standing at the edge of that vast inland sea, a newcomer with a backpack full of books—and quiet intentions to tread lightly.
Lake Michigan is not a lake. It’s an eye. Wide, watchful, ancient. It’s seen factories rise, fish vanish, litter float. But it’s also seen people care. That’s where I want to begin. Not as a tourist or even a student, but a listener.
To study abroad is to move through the world with eyes wide open. But it’s also to leave footprints. In Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago’s gothic towers rise like curious stone trees, I’ll be living in a place where past meets progress. UChicago has pledged carbon neutrality, where even the buildings are graded for their environmental virtue. The university’s Green Campus initiative isn’t just a page on a website—it’s a promise. One I want to mirror.
Illustrations of lunchbox swaps, inked portraits of lakefront volunteers, poems written on receipts. It’s small, but culture shapes consciousness.
My aim is to honour SDG 11—to help craft a sustainable city not through concrete but community.
SDG 12 pulses in the background: I’ll thrift clothes instead of buying new, and trade recipe cards in Hyde Park’s farmers’ market instead of clinging to Uber Eats. SDG 13, the quiet drumbeat of climate action, lives in every deliberate footstep. And SDG 6—clean water—is the silent character in all this, because to live near a Great Lake is to realise that freshwater is not infinite, only invisible in its vanishing.
And how we leave behind only echoes.
