Sophia Grogan returns to Tufts after year of travel

Guitarist and singer Sophia Grogan, a sophomore who matriculated with the class of 2017, returned to the Hill this semester after taking a year off to complete a whirlwind tour of Europe and South America. 

“I took the year off because I wanted to understand more what I wanted to do here at Tufts," Grogan said during an interview. "The original idea was to see how cheap I could travel while supporting myself on music…busking, playing at bars. I started in the Czech Republic… [went to] to Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, into Italy, took a boat to Spain, then went down to Morocco, flew into Scotland, then went to England, then Northern Ireland. Then [I] flew into Buenos Aires and traveled up to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. And then came home.”

When asked for the rationale behind her choice of destinations, Grogan said, “I started in Europe because that’s my heritage…and then Latin America because I feel it’s the best place to go if you’re a low-budget traveler and you have a trade, because the people there seem to really respect musicians in general.”

In addition to using her trip to help clarify her goals at Tufts, Grogan hopes to use her experiences to produce a resource for other college students -- musicians or otherwise -- who want to travel on a budget.This project will likely result in a travel guidebook that Grogan plans to make freely available around campus in the near future. In the more distant future, Grogan also plans on creating a website that links traveling musicians to venues in order to facilitate DIY tours.

Grogan plans to continue traveling and hopes to ride her motorcycle up to the Arctic Circle this summer, playing music as she goes. Grogan regrets not documenting her previous trip and hopes to document this one through a “rough documentary.” It will almost certainly provide an interesting inside look at Grogan's next great adventure.