A Few Thoughts on Leaving Home to Study Abroad

The most recent interview I gave on life as an international student left me a little nostalgic. Alright, it is a very premature feeling, considering that I graduated from college on June, 2011. But, in general, someone who’s always loved to be a student can’t simply walk away from being one so suddenly. Would it be, then, too strange if I started talking about life as an international student, again, even though I perhaps can’t identify myself as a student anymore? In my defense I’ll say that I’m a storyteller, and the three years I spent at Lawrence University certainly marked my life profoundly. Nothing would be more reasonable, in this case, to hear me ranting about the topic once again.

What I have to offer to you, however, is not a topic view article or a how-to on traveling abroad. If you are seriously considering studying abroad I bet you are already familiar with the many websites that offer predeparture information and other useful hints on how to get a bank account if you’re living in a different country, cell phone services, and whatnot. I shall limit my words, for the sake of your patience, to my own trivialities and not very coherent observations on leaving home to go study at distant lands.

Leaving Home

Please, don’t pack your whole room to bring it along with you. When you are getting ready to leave your country and move to foreign lands, there’s nothing more understandable than the need to bring everything that used to make your life comfortable. Of course, you’ll want to bring with you all those books, clothes, pictures, electronics, and the many trinkets you collected throughout your whole life. I know they represent memories you want to have around you when you are so far away from the people you love. I, in fact, even tried packing my loyal Math book, even though I truly hated Mathematics, and still do. But that book was always there for me, no matter whether I wanted it or not around, it was a present figure in my life. My main advice, however, is to pack only the essential, and then look at it and try to limit it even more, mercilessly.

If you’re starting out as a freshman, you’ll spend at least four years at college, and throughout those years (believe me…) you’ll collect even more things you’re not expecting. Throughout Welcome Week they’ll give shirts, mugs, folders, pens, hats, pamphlets, stuff to hang on your door and on the walls, and a ton more objects you’ll keep with you because you’ll be intoxicated by the blind excitement that falls upon every traveler on the first two weeks abroad. You can always push everything under your bed, or put things in drawers, or hide them in your closet or dresser, but by the end of the semester they’ll come back alive and demand to be packed to come along with you wherever you are going. Walking back and forth to your hall’s storage room for a week, alas, with boxes and more boxes of unwanted belongings, lies in your future if you don’t want to pay extra charges for carrying heavy luggage home.