When you first apply to work or study abroad as part of your degree, it’s a given to have various preconceived ideas about the year ahead. Maybe you imagine it will do exactly what it says on the tin – and your placement will be centered around academics or the world of work. Or maybe you spoke to a fourth year student who seduced you with grandiose stories of travel and adventure. The reality is your experience abroad will fall somewhere between the two, and as prepared as you feel, you just won’t see some things coming. So, before you head off: here are a few things they may have forgotten to tell you about studying abroad:
1. You must manage your expectations and be realistic.
This sounds obvious but it is easy to get caught up in daydreams of eating pizza in dimly lit cobbled streets, or sipping on a G&T along the Côte d’Azur when in anticipation of where you may be placed. Chances are you may instead be placed in a smaller and less cosmopolitan location, and this is fine too! As long as you keep an open mind, you will see that everywhere has something to offer, even if it isn’t what you first expected.
2. “You get out of the year abroad what you put in”.
Yes, your personal tutor and the year abroad team did tell you this one, but it doesn’t really sink in until you get there and find your feet. At the beginning it might seem impossible, but if you put yourself out there and talk to as many people as you can from the off, you will thank yourself later!
3. It will be a life-changing experience – but maybe not in the way you imagined.
When you head to the airport with your one-way ticket, you will find yourself daydreaming about the sorts of transformations you will undergo during your time away. Will you master a language? Find true love? Educate the masses? Anything could happen, but if you change in one way, it is that you will discover your own strength. True independence is learnt when alone overseas, and before you know it, you will have shaken off that characteristically British trait of not wanting to offend and start saying what you actually think, and it’s SO liberating.
4. Immigration documents are your responsibility.
You will live this seemingly infinite bureaucratic nightmare for the first few weeks you arrive in your host country, trying to acquire residence permits, work permits, supermarket loyalty cards – and because of Brexit nobody actually knows what you need to do anyway.
5. Pay attention to the rules of the road.
You might find yourself playing your own version of Russian Roulette at a pedestrian crossing, or stepping in dog poo multiple times a day. Just watch where you are going.
6. A whole new culinary world unravels itself before your eyes, and it will be what gets you through the tough days.
7. But Europe can’t do tea. It just doesn’t taste the same, and they all try and serve it with lemon and no milk.
8. Everybody is not their country’s stereotype.
This one is important if you’re looking to avoid disappointment. It sounds obvious, but at times you will be willing for that old lady sat next to you to strike up a conversation and invite you back to hers for a hearty lunch of pasta, meatballs and coffee. Sometimes you do have to remind yourself that you are not living inside a Dolmio advert.
9. You will get major FOMO for back home.
Sure, you’re going backpacking in the Swiss alps this weekend, but you haven’t seen the inviting glow of Wetherspoons for six months now and the void it has left in your heart is growing every day. Just keep eating fondue and pretend it isn’t happening.
10. And when you do go back home, everything and everyone has changed.
To your bewilderment, life at home hasn’t stopped whilst you’ve been away. Even with Facebook and Instagram, you quickly become out of the loop with your besties and their latest experiences, and now understand none of their new inside jokes.
11. Whatever your experience – you won’t regret it.
Because, whether you felt like it was hands-down the best year of your life, or instead a big challenge at best, you won’t be able to deny its value in shaping you into a more resilient you in such a short period. In the end, the nostalgia of the amazing moments will cancel out the struggle, and life will make a lot more sense when you return.