What I Teach My Students About Study Abroad

I’m really getting hungry for one of those crepes oozing with chocolate that they sell near the Notre- Dame Cathedral in Paris. I’m dreaming about a perfectly cloudless day at the Acropolis in Greece, my navy espadrilles covered in dust.

Those images, those smells: my students bring those gifts to me. I’m teaching Travel Reporting this spring, following my students and reading their blogs. They’re living in Paris and Athens, places I’ve been to, and also Auckland and Melbourne, places I’m learning about.

Nostalgia is dangerous, especially at this age. It’s too easy to romanticize my London semester abroad almost 40 years ago. Sometimes, though, between all their stories of visiting the sites in Amsterdam, hectic weekends in Copenhagen, and the 3-minute video capturing the weekend in Athens, I get that glimpse of what I find when I open the pages of my old marbled journal.  I remember the vulnerability and loneliness of chilly walks alone through Hyde Park, those wonderful Wednesday afternoons in the Courtauld Gallery, and that first weekend in Paris eating too many of those crepes.

Their narratives are public. Mine so long ago were private. Yet, I recognize their filters even in the most public posts.

I still can’t believe how I cobbled together that trip through savings and scholarships at a time when very few college students went abroad.  Even now only about 10 percent  – or about 300,000 college students – study abroad during their college years. It’s a great privilege and very expensive. Fortunately, at my university almost two-thirds of the students study abroad and financial aid travels with them. At some point my students usually write about how grateful they are.

I felt the same way. Studying abroad was one of the best decisions of my life.

Two things I share with my students:

Write about the moments that matter and what’s happening in the world around you. My students in Paris and Brussels last semester wrote about how terrorism  changed everything. Focus and capture something in the moment. Write about the people you meet. Move beyond the travel stories, the where I went and what I did. It’s easy enough to GoPro these days.

And then, I always say: Imagine what you might want to read in five years. Think about that when you write.

Of course, I never thought about what I would like to read in 5 years. I could not imagine 40 years. But I knew I was writing something in the moment that I would keep for a very long time.