Create your own experience while you are abroad

Study abroad. Just those two words are enough to start a flood of romanticized ideas of far-away places and expectations.

Forget all of them.

Study abroad isn’t the image those beautiful photos create. It’s not your neighbor’s rendezvous in Spain, nor your cousin’s semester surfing in Australia. It’s not necessarily like any story you’ve heard.

It is whatever you want it to be.

If you want to learn to belly dance in Turkey, fly fish in Patagonia or bake fluffy soufflé in France, you can. If you want to research public health in Brazil with some of the most respected Brazilian professors, explore women’s studies in Jordan, or learn Swahili in Tanzania, you can. If you want to barely study at all, you can do that, too. If you want to burst your comfort bubble, there are plenty of choices. If you prefer your bubble, there are American programs and some with UNC professors.

And if there’s not a program with the focus you want, you can find an institution that offers it and petition to participate in their program. 

“Study abroad” isn’t an experience. It’s the infrastructure to create any kind of experience for yourself.

Figuring out what you want that experience to be is the difficult part. Let go of any decisions already settling in your head and consider why you want to go abroad and what you want to learn — independent of a place. Are you going for rigorous academics or free time to explore an activity that you’ve never had time to pursue? Do you want to be with a lot of Americans or none at all?

I had all but applied to a program in Spain when I decided to take my own advice and start from scratch, getting to the root of what I wanted from my semester abroad. Now I’m halfway around the world from Spain, taking salsa classes, studying philosophy and hiking through the Andes in Mendoza, Argentina — a perfect fit for me. But I never considered Mendoza in the year or two I spent thinking about study abroad because I had those romanticized images settled in my head.

Looking back, finding the right program isn’t the only thing about study abroad I wish I’d learned as a first-year. Know that some requirements are easier to get while abroad than others. Few foreign education systems offer classes for UNC’s U.S. Diversity requirement. If you’re considering going abroad, ask your adviser which requirements are easier to get abroad, and consider holding off on those so you don’t get behind while you’re away.

Also remember that a lot of programs have language requirements. A semester off from language classes could end up meaning studying abroad later than you wanted.

Advisers are helpful for academic credit information, but if you want to know the social or personal aspects of a program, contact a student who studied there. We give our e-mail addresses on student response forms because we want to. I promise the student you contact won’t be annoyed. Ex-study-abroad students love talking about study abroad. If nothing else, they’ll be glad to have someone who hasn’t grown tired of hearing “This one time in …” yet.

Don’t think you can’t go because you’ve heard it’s expensive. Program costs vary greatly, and there are tons of scholarships out there, through UNC and other organizations. If you want to go badly enough, you can.