Year Abroad: Exciting or Terrifying?

The year abroad aspect of my course, much like lucid dreaming or chlamydia, was something I was fully aware existed but never thought would actually happen to me.

On my first day at University, all of the students in the school of American Studies attended a meeting in which the head of the department asked us to raise our hands if the main reason we had chosen to do our course was because of the opportunity it provided to study abroad. Half the room did so. I did not.

Don’t get me wrong. I found it an exciting prospect – I mean, I was going to get to spend a year in a country with red cups and brown paper ‘grocery’ bags and would finally, after many years of hearing people go on about them, try an In-N-Out Burger. What’s not to get excited about? Except that, you know, America is very far away, I don’t know a single soul who lives there and due to the drinking age I’ll be drinking apple juice out of the aforementioned red cups until April 2013.

As naive and impressionable Freshers, we all listened excitedly as pictures were painted of us all revising for our final exams on a beach in California, complete with perfect tans and some Seth Cohen lookalike teaching us how to skateboard or surf or something cool like that. Then we all filed out of the room, headed back to our halls to get drunk for the LCR Welcome Party and forgot all about it.

Fast forward a year and I’m back in that same room. My head hurts and I’m trying to remember why I decided it was a good idea to sit in a stuffy, overcrowded lecture theatre for two hours when I kept throwing up in my mouth. Someone hands me a document and upon flicking through it I see that half of the Universities I wanted to apply to weren’t even on the list and the year was going to cost me several thousand dollars. My friends either side of me groan and fidget. A fourth year student stands up and speaks about her experiences and we all sit up and listen; she’s actually being kind of honest. Maybe it wasn’t the best year of her life, but she seems to have come back in one piece. And she saved loads of money on nights out, since there were no nights out. Another guy comes to the front and warns us, outright, not to go to Missouri. Ever. We laugh, now all terrified we will somehow all end up in Missouri due to an administrative error. A couple of students who spent the last year in San Francisco or Berkeley tell us more about how amazing the West Coast is. We tune out. I’m starting to feel like the kids who end up in California are like the people in district 1 of the Hunger Games.

Suddenly, it’s all become rather real. Over the next couple of days I sit for hours in the Hub outside the year abroad office and read the debriefing forms all UEA students are required to write upon returning to the UK. For a while I feel as if I’m doing UCAS all over again. Pictures of white toothed, wholesome American teens sitting in “Quads” surrounded by autumn trees cloud my vision. I think lovingly of the wet, grey concrete square where I ate my lunch earlier that day.

We have two weeks to decide on which five universities we would like to choose to attend and those of us who are on the year abroad programme spend most of it screeching, “I DON’T WANT TO GO!” and watching the UEA promotional video on YouTube over and over again. We worry about how much it’s going to cost. What if we don’t make any friends? We’re going to miss out on watching our friends back home graduating. We’ll come back in fourth year to dissertations and a much depleted group of friends.

I complain about it so much that one evening, over supper, a friend loses her cool.

“If you don’t want to go that badly, don’t go. Find some excuse” she barks at me over her stir fry.

I sit there for a moment. I consider it. And then I realise how ridiculous I am being.

During my research I have discovered a ream of American colleges on both the East and West coast that boast amazing creative writing faculties, in places I’ve actually heard of.

Yes, it will be expensive and I am going to miss this silly but wonderful University like mad, but I managed to make friends here. Why not on another continent? They speak English, sort of, and who doesn’t love being told they have a ‘cute’ accent?

The bottom line is, there’s a reason that this University’s year abroad programme is considered one of the best in the country. And even if I don’t end up on a beach in California with Seth Cohen by my side it might not be so bad.

And if it is, I can always come home for Christmas.