You hear it around college campuses all the time. “Studying abroad totally changed my life.” Or the ever-so-famous, “I am so much more culturally aware because of my trip.” These comments, though annoyingly repetitive, are spoken for a reason. It is true that there are numerous benefits to studying abroad. Your taste buds are blessed with culinary masterpieces. You get to make your friends jealous on Instagram. Everyone seems to have an improved perspective on happenings around the globe. But one of the most overlooked paybacks of studying abroad is finding who you are as an individual and what you’re made of as a person. This only happens by stripping away all your safety nets.
No one ever said studying abroad would be easy. Its 2 a.m. in Europe and you’re still dizzy from your eight hour plane ride. There are no street signs or police stations to guide you. You can hear your mom’s nagging voice in your head saying, “Be safe, listen to your teacher, and don’t get lost.” Well, now you are indeed lost, and you’re terrified. That fearless traveler inside misses the familiarity of the local drug store and Wi-Fi in your hometown. Suddenly, it’s just you and a junior you met two days ago wandering aimlessly, trying to solve the jigsaw puzzle of this brand new world.
The good news is that you make it back alive. You do eventually find your way home after another hour of roaming and panic attacks. And the next morning, you wake up to realize you didn’t break down. You survived without your parents' help, and that stranger you were lost with is now a friend and a comrade, molded from the unknown. This won’t be your last blunder during your time abroad. You will face challenge after challenge, whether it be the inevitable language barrier that makes you wish you had listened more attentively in French, or realizing that just because you are of legal drinking age doesn’t mean you should consume five glasses of wine a day. Though all of these misfortunes might sound like a real downer, they are the tribulations that will mold you into all you are meant to be.
Studying abroad means that you become cut off from all you have ever known. Your phone, your friends and your community are thousands of miles away. I decided to take the plunge this spring break without friends or any prior experience. What I can say is that I am grateful I did. Each day that I was forced away from my familiar atmosphere, the layers of others' influence upon me were shed. I listened intensely to my own senses and thoughts. I trusted in my instincts. I was cognitively allowing myself to be independent, something I was not aware I was neglecting until I stepped off the plane in Italy.
You could say I treaded foreign ground those two weeks, both on my feet and in my mind. I realized that with every trial comes a choice—a choice to be brave, to reveal understanding, to feel a sense of heart and home wherever you are. You learn to have faith in yourself as an individual, something we desperately need in order to be our best selves for others. We must have trust in our ability to simply "be." I also learned that others cannot make mistakes for you. Being scammed into a $70 lunch at the Vatican definitely wasn’t in my travel guide, but you could say I paid for a lesson that would become, though grudgingly accepted, valuable for my future.
If you study abroad, I promise you will not only make it back to your hotel at 3 a.m. but also become a better version of you. There is no growth without risks. I gained some beautiful friends, historical knowledge and even a few delicious pounds from my time abroad. But the most important thing I took home was my shiny, new, puzzle piece of self, ready to take on whatever life wanted to throw at me. When you are stripped down to what you are made of on the inside, you give your personality a chance to shine through the insecurities and overbearing influences of home life that we so often let overtake our character. Because of all the new places and faces, you become, if only for a few days, who you are meant to be—and I think you’ll like what you see.
