This past academic year, UM Law expanded its relation with Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the host school to UM Law's summer abroad program in Spain. Last fall, Universitat Pompeu Fabra sent two of its law students to Miami for the semester. In January, Miami reciprocated by sending two students to Barcelona. Megan Renze was one of the two students selected. "I saw an email from the Dean's Office last November and I thought it looked interesting, so I applied, never really expecting anything to come from it."

Because the exchange requires the participants to enroll directly in the other school's courses, fluency is required. To apply for the program, UM students are required to submit an application that includes a personal statement written in Spanish. The finalists are then required to interview in Spanish.

With Universitat Pompeu Fabra operating on a trimester calendar, Megan's classes started in early January and did not conclude until July. She took three classes each trimester. Her first trimester, she had Constitutional Law, Theory and Negotiation, and Business Associations. During her second trimester, she took Civil Procedures, Economic Law, and European Union.

The classes she selected were a mix of first-year and upper-level classes. The first-year classes had about one hundred students and the upper-level classes had about forty. With the lecture as the main method of instruction and little additional, assigned reading, Megan found the Spanish legal pedagogy to be a strong contrast to her legal studies in the United States. "Spanish law is based principally on legal codes, not on cases like it is in the United States. My classmates were shocked to hear that for a typical class in the U.S. it's not unusual to read a hundred cases."

The grading scale in Spain runs from a zero to ten, but UM students take the classes on a pass/fail basis. Megan had final exams for her first-year level courses, and she wrote papers for two of her upper-level courses. While Megan is fluent in Spanish, she says that the greatest challenge of the program was acquiring the legal terminology, a task that took her the majority of the first semester. By the end of the second semester, she had enough confidence in her legal Spanish that she opted to take an oral final exam, instead of the written version, for one of her classes.

Megan's tuition was not altered by participating in the exchange and her financial aid package covered her expenses. "Barcelona is considered an expensive city by the Spaniards, but I found my living expenses to be lower than what I was accustomed to in Miami. I found a great apartment not far from campus that I shared with students from Italy and Mexico."

When Megan returned from Spain this summer, she resumed her internship with Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). She has been an intern with ICE since June of 2002 and plans on practicing immigration law after graduating from Miami in spring 2004. Originally from Minnesota, Megan was a dual major in International Relations and Spanish at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. During undergrad she studied abroad in Guatemala and Colombia. Prior to law school, Megan was with Merrill Lynch for two and a half years in Jacksonville, Florida.