My Main Takeaways

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place… like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” – Azar Nafisi

Ever since traveling to Cape Town for a two-week short-term exchange, I’ve considered how I should talk about my travels to a country when asked by someone about them. It is important to be careful when just using one sentence to describe a place that you spent time in. To get an accurate picture, you really have to listen to the stories of the experience. You have to understand that the experiences of a visitor to a small area for a limited amount of time can’t possibly represent how the entire city or country is.

As I have reflected about this semester, I have thought about how I should communicate my time abroad if asked about it. I could start quantitatively. My exchange semester was just under 4 months with 113 other exchange students around 4,000 miles from College Park. I went on 10 weekend trips to 7 countries and traveled thousands of kilometers. The experiences are easier to communicate quantitatively than qualitatively because numbers can be understood instantly. Telling the entire story of study abroad, on the other hand, can easily take several hours because it is itself made up of so many smaller stories.

My exchange semester ends in five days. Bittersweetness’ fascinating emotional contrasts flood my heart in similar fashion to last August, when I was packing bags and saying goodbyes for the semester. When I was younger, I dreaded these bittersweet moments – I only saw the negative in them. College offers plenty of bittersweet moments, and as I have encountered more and more of them, I have come to be grateful for these turning points, as they signal that you are happy for what was and happy for what is to come.

I reread a blog post that I published shortly before leaving for my exchange semester. I wrote about this bittersweet feeling that I felt leaving my friends, family, and familiar surroundings for the semester. I also wrote about being excited to begin a journey, not just physically but also metaphorically – a journey of growth and of learning about myself. Throughout the semester, I thought back to this slightly-cliché idea of learning about myself when abroad. In particular, I thought about whether I was actually doing this, and if so how. I still loved music and coffee, I still went to the gym, I still cooked the same foods. Was I just not learning about myself or did I already know exactly who I was? I think some of the answer lies in the details of my passions.

Of course, I still loved my same passions, but during the semester I found myself being reminded of why I love them. And being abroad helped with this because it presented an unfamiliar situation that allowed this discovery to happen. I think back to playing guitar in a room with fifty other exchange students, all singing along avidly to ‘Country Roads’. This experience of sharing a musical moment with students from over a dozen countries was a unique encounter that reminded me of a reason why I love music so much.

Something I did at the beginning of the semester was to think about how I was introducing myself or getting to know the exchange students. Was I doing so in a different way than I would back in College Park? Did the environmental change impact how I acted in a group setting? This is something I thought about a lot transitioning from high school to college. While I am not sure I have an answer, thinking about this while you are abroad can help you gain insight into yourself, in my opinion. I stumbled across the Azar Nafisi quote and reflected about whether the environment you are in can truly change your personality to the point that you can’t be that exact person anymore if you leave that environment. Personally, I think this comes down to how long you spend in this environment, as well as the friends and family that you associate with that place.

In my August blog post, I also wrote about coming into the semester without any expectations. I wrote about wanting to maintain an open mind throughout the semester, which I definitely did. But I must admit that I did in fact have one expectation before leaving: that I would meet and become close friends with the local German students. As a fluent German, I thought this was a given. I also recognized that the school has just over 1,000 students, so I thought that this would naturally happen with smaller classes.

While I did make German friends throughout the semester, I think my expectation did not become a reality to the extent that I thought it would. This is partially due to the fact that none of my classes, as opposed to other classes at WHU, had group projects, which was an effective way for exchange students to meet and work with German students. But the other takeaway for me is that I could have been more proactive myself. While I was initially frustrated that I hadn’t met many German students, I imagined the opposite scenario. In all of my semesters at UMD, I have never met an exchange student from abroad. Perhaps this is also because UMD has close to thirty times as many students as WHU. But it is also due to the fact that I am familiar with the campus and my friend group. The takeaway for me: in a foreign environment, don’t expect the locals to go out of their way to speak to you; instead, sometimes you should take the opportunity to do so yourself.

Finally, having the chance to study abroad is something I am extremely grateful for. Only a small fraction of the world has the chance to pursue a college education, of which only some have the opportunity to take their education abroad for a semester. When I visited my grandparents over the semester in Germany, they told me stories from when they were growing up, of hardships unimaginable to me, of life-or-death situations that they experienced. My parents and grandparents have faced much more adversity than me, and studying abroad is one reminder of the privileges that I have. For me, it is important to recognize that the problems I encounter on a daily basis aren’t crises. They are really just opportunities to learn and grow.