If your major or minor is a foreign language, you’ve probably heard time and again that studying abroad is a good idea—they’re not wrong. Of course moving to a country that speaks Spanish will help you improve your Spanish skills, or a country that speaks French will help you improve your French skills, and so on and so forth. Traveling abroad to learn a new language is important but what about studying abroad for people who already speak the language and don’t need it for their major? Are there benefits in that? What about spending a semester in England? Or spending a few months taking courses in New Zealand? Or even just going to Spain or France, even though neither of those languages are subjects you are studying in college? Are there benefits to studying abroad, even if it isn’t for a language major?
With most Semester Abroad programs, you do not need to speak the language to go. Although it would be easier to live somewhere where you know the language, it is possible to survive in a country while not speaking the language. Studying abroad does not only improve your language skills--that’s a given, but it also strengthens your character.
Here are four things that happen to you when you study abroad:
When Studying Abroad, You Will Gain Independence: Fact
When you’re living on a different continent, far away from everything you’re familiar with, and you have to learn to function outside of your comfort zone, in a culture you might not understand, you learn to believe in yourself—because you have to. You are buying your own metro cards, bus tickets, train tickets, flights, and keeping track of all the new information you just learned, your itinerary, your documents, etc. You are living on your own in the unknown, and because of this you learn to have faith in yourself, you learn to trust your gut and do things all alone, which makes you more independent.
With Independence Comes Confidence
After doing so many new things you’d never thought you’d ever do (ex. traveling alone, navigating through a huge city, learning a different culture), you start to rely on yourself more, and trust yourself, which blooms confidence. Sometimes on campus you get caught up in this culture where everyone is judging, everyone wants to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what everyone will think. When you move halfway across the world, you realize the world is so big, and it’s so trivial to worry about what people think. Plus while studying abroad you’ve probably humiliated yourself enough times for a lifetime so there’s really nothing you can do to make it worse.
Learning How to Solve Problems
When you move anywhere unfamiliar, you’re probably going to run into some problems—not probably, definitely. You might freak out and cry, maybe throw a little tantrum—call your parents—but then you’ll realize that the only one that can solve your problem is you, and you’ll have to push through it and figure it out. Or you could just sit on the floor of the Amsterdam airport and cry all night because you missed your flight and now you’re stuck, your call. While studying abroad, you teach yourself how to get out of stressful situations, you learn new ways to come up with solutions, and you learn not to give up. Willingly or not, you will learn how to solve problems, possibly just because you have to, but when you return home and encounter other difficulties, nothing will faze you, because you’ve been through worse—all alone, and you survived.
You’ll Learn So Much More Than Just the Language
You learn how to engage and understand different people, not only through language, but through culture. You’ll try new things you’ve never done before: be it little things like tasting snail for the first time, or big things like scuba dive with sharks in Sydney. You’ll put life into perspective. You’ll see the world through a viewpoint that isn’t your own. You’ll learn what people really think of your countrymen, how you come off to others—you’ll learn so much more about yourself. You’ll think about why you do things the way you do, and maybe the way people do it somewhere else is better. You will broaden your worldview and realize that there is so much more to the world than where you grew up. Everyone is not the same as you, and it’s good to see in what way they are different.
As a study abroad alumni—I can tell you that studying abroad will change your life. You learn so much more than just the language—you learn life lessons that you will carry with you forever. After seeing the sun set on a different horizon you will never be the same person again. It's a scary thing, leaving everything you know behind, but when you immerse yourself in the richness of the unknown, you gain a kind of paradise.
