Studying or working internationally can be stressful, expensive and lonely. Some days you’ll wake up and wade through tides of confusion until you crawl back into bed at night, mentally exhausted. You’ll miss your family, your friends and certain comforts from home you never knew you’d ache for.
In spite of all of this, I think it’s one of the most rewarding experiences a young person can have at the outset of their career. I learned more about myself, the world and what I wanted to do with my life in my six months abroad than I did during my whole undergraduate degree.
Growing up, I was the antithesis of someone you’d expect to live abroad. I was a shy kid who grew up in rural southwestern Ontario. The only international trips I’d taken were to see baseball games in Detroit, and a couple of road trips to Florida.
The closest experience I had to a interacting with a foreign culture was with my grandparents on my Dad’s side. They immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in the 1960s and have lived in Ontario ever since. From time to time I’d ask what it was like there and about other family members still living there, but I always thought of experiencing Holland for myself as a bucket-list type of thing.
It wasn’t until my third year at Carleton University in Ottawa that travelling there presented itself as an option. I was studying journalism and stressing over those big existential questions twenty-somethings usually stress over:
• Did I choose the right program?
• How am I going to find a job after graduation?
• What is my career going to look like?
With those issues weighing on my mind,
I thought studying abroad might help me figure out a few of them. I browsed the different countries and schools I could travel to, but only two had programs where the credits would transfer back to my degree at Carleton: Denmark and the Netherlands.
I took it as a sign that it was time for me to visit my ancestral homeland and went full-steam ahead planning my adventure. After a year of saving money and filling out endless amounts of paperwork, I was sitting on a red-eye flight somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, excited and feeling good about my decision.
NEDERLAND—Dutch
It didn’t take very long for me to feel like I’d made the right choice. Almost as soon as I stepped off the plane, my life became a whirlwind of new experiences, language and culture.
Almost everything about being a student there was internationally-focused. My residence building housed students from both the Netherlands and all over the world. We spent so many (late) nights sharing stories about our countries and laughing about all the cultural differences we found.
At school, my course topics ranged from European cities to art history to the state of religion in modern Europe. My program was made up entirely of international students, so we were able to bring many different cultural perspectives to classroom debates.
When we had some time off school, my friends and I did the backpacking thing, staying in hostels and jumping from country to country faster than a fugitive. You don’t really get to “know”
a country in this way, but it’s a great way to
get the flavour of many different countries.
Outside of school and travelling, I spent a lot of time with my Dutch family, who couldn’t have been more accommodating. They told me many stories about our family history and took me to see where my grandparents were born, and to the cemeteries where our great relatives were buried.
Six months flew by way too fast, and I found myself back on another red-eye flight to Ottawa. It wasn’t until I got back that I felt I could fully process everything I did and saw, and looking back now it all still feels like a visceral dream.
WHAT I LEARNED
Studying abroad gave me answers to a lot of the questions I was struggling with back home.
A lot of articles I’ve read on personal development stress the idea of putting yourself outside your comfort zone, somehow finding that space where you’re challenged without feeling frustrated.
I think studying abroad puts you right in that sweet spot. You’ll encounter the normal problems that come from travelling, like language barriers and visa issues, but you’ll also face everyday problems, like getting sick or running low on cash, that become magnified by the fact that you’re in a foreign country.
Figuring out solutions to these problems on your own does wonders for your independence, and in my experience, I learned how to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
So when I got back, I found a lot of my anxiety about the future was gone. My inner monologue stopped saying, “How are you going to figure this out?” and switched to: “Well, it’ll be hard, but you’ve solved tougher problems.”
Travelling also forces you to come to terms with the absolute immensity of the world. This gave me a confidence that no matter what how bad the economy gets or what degree I graduate with, there will always be an opportunity somewhere out there for me to make a living (if I’m willing to work hard for it).
Studying abroad isn’t a panacea or a guaranteed solution to all of the stresses of being a young adult, but I think there’s a special form of self-realization that it can offer, like swinging a wrecking ball at all of your preconceptions about the world and about yourself. CO
