"Do you LOVE being abroad? Are you having the time of your life? Isn't it amazing?" If you have ever studied abroad, there is an almost certain chance that you have been bombarded with these kinds of questions an infinite number times. And while it may be easy to reply with short statements like “It’s incredible” or “I love it!”, there also exists a side to study abroad that not everyone is comfortable talking about.
Studying abroad can be a struggle made worse by it being multi-faceted struggle. You don't know the country in. A majority (if not all) your closest friends are all back home. You miss the comfort of your usual residence. The quick check-in’s, social media posts, and pictures all make it seem like everything during your time away is incredible, but in all reality tweets and snapshots can’t express the difficulty you are going through while studying abroad.
There is a stigma for study abroad to be a perfect, amazing experience, and it is easy to beat yourself up when this is not the case. You ask yourself why you aren’t nailing the experience, wonder why you're as homesick as you are, and maybe begin to doubt if you ever should have studied abroad in the first place.
However, amidst asking yourself these questions it is important to remember at t key things.
1. What you're doing is hard. Adjusting to a new culture is challenging. Adulting at your regular school is difficult in and of itself and even more so while studying abroad. Traveling and sight seeing can be super stressful as you figure out locations, transportation logistics, and making the most of your time abroad. Seeing posts from the people you miss most doing the things back home that you love doing makes you homesick. Thinking about how to pay for it all causes the occasional mini heart attack. You need to plant roots in the place you're about to do life for the next semester but you also don't have enough time to do that. Studying abroad is by no means an easy thing to do and, like all hard things, you may have to struggle in order to do it well.
2. You don't owe it to anyone to have a good experience. The world will not fall apart if you go through your entire study abroad experience and hate it. Your friends back home, parents, and teachers will not love or respect you any less for having a hard time while studying or working in a different country. The only person to whom you owe a good experience is yourself and, if you're doing the best you can to make the most out of your circumstances, that's all you can do.
3. The point of Study/Education Abroad is to learn. You will learn during your time abroad. Although this is normally promoted through the contexts of cultural exchange, language immersion and international classes, being abroad inevitably teaches you something about life. You gain a new perspective, further discover the challenges that come from adulting, learn how to adjust to new situations, the list goes on and on. Learn from your hardships. Grow as a person. When people ask you about your time abroad, it may be really easy to list off everything you struggled through but, by recognizing the ways in which you've grown and changed from your experience, you will easily be able to tell them, "I grew so much. I changed. I wouldn't change anything about it."
