Anyone who has studied abroad or who has friends that have returned from studying abroad know that a semester or year in a foreign place is an unquestionably valuable addition to any undergraduate’s experience. However, just like studying at your home college or university, the experience is what you make of it.
Among friends about to leave for abroad, there tends to be a discussion about the mutual pressure everyone feels to do justice to the almost fantastical build up that characterizes the study abroad experience. With so many testimonials of past abroad students being thrown around that study abroad “changed my life” or “it made me a better person,” it was almost impossible not to have high expectations.
I’d been eagerly anticipating studying abroad in my junior year since I applied Early Decision to Kenyon. But, in the months leading up to my departure to my fall semester abroad in Italy, I became more and more reluctant to leave. At the beginning of that year, I’d experienced serious upheavals in my personal life that left me wanting to cling to anything and everything familiar or comfortable. One of my most nagging worries was what one of my friends called the Time Machine Effect. By studying abroad, I would be leaving the campus and friends I had poured all my energy into over the past two years and had grown to love, and would essentially drop off the face of my known reality, only to return eight months later to a different reality, one that had sped up without me. What concerned me most, though, was that the experience I had in front of me promised to change still more aspects of my life, when all I wanted was to pick up the pieces of my old one.
Despite of all this doubt, I had made a commitment to myself, so I followed through. As soon as I walked through airport security at Logan’s International terminal, more completely alone than I had ever been in my life and with no idea what was in front of me, I knew I’d made the right decision. This was something I had always dreamed of. If I’d backed out like I had wanted to, I would have been selling myself short and, in a sense, deviating from an ideal version of myself I had mentally constructed. By sticking to my original plan, I was choosing to put the person I was and wanted to be before the voice in my head saying it wasn’t worth it.
In the months that followed I climbed countless ancient ruins, ate an impossible amount of pasta, and made several of what I hope will be lifelong friends. My time in Italy will likely be the highlight of my Kenyon career, and I am so grateful to my reluctant but proud parents, my always supportive friends, and the happy accident of my good fortune that allowed me to experience something so beautiful. It was an experience that allowed me to learn about the world and about myself without pushing me to fundamentally change who I am.
For some people, having a life-changing study abroad experience is what they set out to do. For others, studying abroad may not be the right decision at all. What I hope people take away from my experience is clichéd: college is what you make of it. If something isn’t going quite the way you planned, try looking at it from a new perspective. Maybe to some people what I’ve described would count as a life changing experience. All I know for sure is that I returned from study abroad feeling more like myself than I ever have before.
Image Credit: Emily Stegner