Why study abroad isn’t always the best year of your life

as a foreign service brat who’s grown up in five different countries and spent more than half your life overseas, I figured I would eventually study abroad. But I didn’t start to seriously consider it until sophomore year of college.

While freshman year had been nothing but fun and excitement, sophomore year was a bit of a letdown. All of a sudden I had more reading, tougher assignments, and friendships that I had thought would last forever started to drift apart. I started experiencing something my friends called the “sophomore slump” and what the counseling center told me were “depressive symptoms”.

It wasn’t until Christmas break, when I was lying in the backseat of my mom’s Highlander in the Pentagon City mall parking lot, having what was becoming an increasingly long list of meltdowns, that she brought up going abroad. At that moment, it seemed like the escape I had been waiting for.

I had high expectations for study abroad. I thought I could escape the monotonous routine that I had somehow managed to get stuck into and have brand new experiences. Hell, I could even become a brand new person, one who was more outgoing and less sad. But most of all, I would have the best year of my life. I even had proof. Everyone I spoke to about study abroad, from other W&M students to my parents’ friends, told me that their time abroad had been the best year of their life. If it was for them, then it was guaranteed to be the same for me, right?

Here’s why it wasn’t, and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I faced a variety of challenges, including:

Culture shock

To be brutally honest, I was the last person in the world I expected to suffer from culture shock. Given that half my childhood had been spent living in other cultures, I figured I was pretty much immune. But it’s one thing when you have your parents, an embassy, and an entire community of other families to help you out. It’s a completely different, and oddly terrifying, story when you have to work out currency, food shopping, and public transportation all on your own.

Making friends

This was another thing that I felt like would be a no-brainer for me. I have never had trouble making friends, especially not with people from other countries. But for the first time, I really struggled. Maybe it was the fact that the student housing I was living in was mainly inhabited by students who were younger than me. Or that the classes I took were composed of third years who were already firmly settled into their friend groups. I’m in no way suggesting that everyone wasn’t perfectly nice and accommodating, because they absolutely were. But nevertheless, the problem persisted.

Loneliness

After two years of sharing a room with other people, I was understandably excited when I realized I would have my own room and en-suite bathroom. But I quickly became very lonely. I missed having someone to come home to after classes, someone I could share the events of my day with, someone who I could talk to about pretty much anything. It turned out that living on my own was not as glamorous as I had imagined.

I also learned a wide range of things: 

How to travel on my own

I’m an incredibly anxious person, so any form of traveling makes me nervous. But I didn’t come all the way to Europe just to sit in my room. So, that meant I had to travel. I learned how to plan trips, get good deals on flights, book hotel rooms, and the get myself to the airport and get on a plane. All by myself. The first time I flew to Paris on my own was terrifying. But I survived. And now every time I go somewhere, I’m less nervous. Learning to travel on my own has made me more confident in myself and what I can accomplish.

How to appreciate the little things

As I said before, I had big plans for my study abroad experience, most of which did not come true. But I learned to be OK with that, and to instead appreciate the opportunities that did come my way, no matter how small. For example, putting together a makeshift Thanksgiving with a group of other international students. Or getting to volunteer with a project that digitized letters written by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Hardy. None of these experiences were earth-shattering, but they were special in their own way and I’m immensely proud of them.

How to be happy

OK, I know this is incredibly vague, but it’s true, I swear. Studying abroad showed me that life isn’t assuming great things are going to happen, but choosing to go out and make them happen. I chose to study abroad because I wanted to become a different person, but instead I realized that it was my perspective on life that was the problem. Once I changed that, I became a much happier person. Cross my heart.

The bottom line is, this article is not meant to discourage you from studying abroad, or to suggest that my study abroad experience was bad. Quite the opposite. Even though study abroad didn’t turn out how I expected, and even though it probably wasn’t the best year of my life, its challenges taught me to have a better attitude and it made me a stronger person overall.

I have never for one second regretted going abroad, but I know that I would have regretted it every day if I hadn’t.