The rhetoric surrounding study abroad is always the same: This will be the best time of your life. It sounds a lot like what everyone says about your overall college experience. You’re expected to have an insane amount of fun and make thousands of lifelong memories. This pressure is only intensified while studying abroad, when it seems most cost effective to have the best time of your life.
If you’re traveling briefly, on a summer semester, it’s likely that your experience will reflect this mindset. Your “study abroad” is more like a three- to six-week vacation, where you only have to take one or two classes. You’ll spend more time drinking wine in an Italian café than doing work or acting as you normally would at an American university.
Conversely, a semester-long study abroad experience is just that: a semester long. You have a lot more time to acclimate, so much that it begins to become a fascinating foreign routine — you’ve been waking up for months in a foreign country. You’re also taking a semester’s load of courses, which means a semester’s load of work. None of this is said to discourage you; I decided to study for an entire semester for this exact reason: for the mundane as well as the adventurous. When you study abroad for a semester, you actually live in a new country for three to four months. You do laundry, sleep in, stay in on a Saturday night and watch Netflix, just as you would at home.
I grappled with this for a few weeks during my stay: How can I let myself do anything I consider “normal” or routine while I’m studying abroad? I felt that everything I did had to be special in some way. I couldn’t just sleep in because I stayed out all night — I had to wake up early and walk around a park or something. I couldn’t just go to the library to write a paper — I had to find a unique coffee shop to work. I felt the overwhelming need to make every moment of every day special because I was in England. I couldn’t do anything of the average things I would (or should) do at UF, because I was paying to be in a foreign country.
I spent nearly every weekend traveling around the U.K. and Europe, yet I became anxious about where I would write my paper or what time I should wake up on a Sunday. Knowing myself, I realize that I have a problem living in the moment. I know I held this fear when I went to study abroad. I worried that I would be too caught up with the next trip or assignment to remember to make memories now, and to make every moment of my experience special. What I didn’t realize is that the mundane is part of the experience. Each of the seemingly dull, average things I did during the week was another small reminder of how totally immersed in English culture I was lucky enough to be. Figuring out weird laundry machines or having misadventures in the grocery store are the small facets of study abroad that work in unison with the fantastical European excursions to make this experience so unique and memorable. Not every moment needed to be Instagram-worthy.
Often, I found that my experiences weren’t noteworthy at all. Sometimes, I just needed to binge-watch a few hours of Netflix because that’s something comforting and relaxing that I enjoy doing. The extreme highs of world travel become exhausting without periods of rest and reflection that come from the more mundane. Not every second of your time abroad needs to be jam-packed with lifelong memories. Studying abroad is not the measure of each individual day or experience, but rather the sum of all the memories together. If you manage to step out of your comfort zone, see the world, meet interesting people and have a wonderful time, you’ve already succeeded.
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