Kate Cunningham
How to do you make the most out of your study abroad experience? When you are new to the study abroad experience, you don’t have the hindsight to know how to make the most of your international opportunity. That is why it is so important to speak to ‘seasoned’ people who have studied abroad or professionals who have incorporated living abroad into their lives or professions. In today’s guest post, we learn that at the core of a healthy and fun study abroad experience is you attitude. There is an adage that says that life is 90% attitude. The same holds true for study abroad, it’s all about your attitude.
This guest post is contributed by Kate Cunningham, who writes on the topics of online university rankings. Feel free to send your questions and comments to her email: cn.kate1@gmail.com.
Maximizing Your Study Abroad Experience: It’s All About Attitude
When I was an undergraduate, I studied abroad for a semester in Russia, a country that was as different from my where I attended university as I could possibly think of. While I tried my best to prepare myself for the trip, and even though I had traveled substantially overseas before, nothing was able to fully prepare me for the differences that I encountered. Looking back on the experience, however, I will say that it gave me a much better sense of how to effectively deal with the trials and travails that inevitably come with being in an unfamiliar place. The key to making the most of studying abroad is all contained in how you moderate your own attitude. Here are 4 tips to keep in mind on your first or next study abroad experience.
1. Never compare your home country with the visiting country.
Of course, it’s only natural to base your conceptions of a foreign country on what you’ve experienced before, whether it’s your home or another country you’ve visited. This instinctive mental exercise, however, will severely limit your enjoyment of the host country. I cannot count the times my American friends and I would say, “Isn’t this ridiculous? In America, this would never happen.” Try your best to forget your previous experiences in order to have a more pure, untainted sense of what the culture is really like.
2. Don’t attribute an unpleasant occurrence to the country’s culture.
Just as in your home country, when you study abroad, you’ll invariably run into a frustrating situation, made all the more frustrating by the fact that you are a foreigner. You may have encounters with a few rude people, and it’s typical to make the logical leap that your host country’s people are just “like that”. Nothing could be further from the truth. While of course, some social customs are different (for example, it’s less common for Russians to smile openly in public), rudeness is not a defined cultural trait in any country. Rudeness can be encountered anywhere, and if it happens more often in the country you’re visiting, it probably arises from a web of misconceptions or misunderstandings.
3. Get out of your comfort zone.
When people are in an unfamiliar situation, they tend to gravitate to those who are most like them. During my experience, that meant being among my American peers, especially since my fairly limited academic knowledge of Russian was too shaky to start conversations and make Russian friends with ease. However, once I consciously tried to move beyond my familiar circle, I was surprised by how open my Russian peers were to accommodating me, despite the sometimes seemingly insurmountable language and cultural barriers.
4. Take your classes seriously, even if they’re easy.
When students study abroad, there’s a tendency to think of the experience as an extended vacation. Of course, this attitude makes sense in some way. After all, you’ll most likely be very far away from your previous structured lifestyle and your courses may be significantly easier than your courses at your home university, many of which will count for credit but not for a grade. It’s then easy for young university students to fall into “typical” study abroad activities, like drinking heavily.
That isn’t to say one shouldn’t engage in such social activities, but it can very easily be taken to an extreme, causing you to miss out on far more enriching cross-cultural encounters. Focusing on classes as if you were at home places an emphasis on study abroad as a living experience and not a trivial visiting experience.
These are only a few things to keep in mind before or during your study abroad experience. While it is necessary to research the country and general traveling tips before going overseas, altering your attitude is just as important. If you don’t, you can very easily spend months or longer in a foreign country without experiencing anything substantive about another culture or place.
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