College is the perfect opportunity to study abroad. At what other time in your life will you be mature enough to appreciate the opportunity to learn about another culture but young enough to be spontaneous and enjoy yourself fully? Your responsibilities in college, although they may seem daunting right now, are actually quite limited (read: no kids and no mortgage), and leaving college for a semester to explore another country is actually looked upon favorably by employers, whereas leaving your job for six months for the same purpose is not.
However, many students, for a variety of reasons, choose not to study abroad. Below you will find the most common excuses for not studying abroad and the reasons why those excuses are, in many cases, not valid at all:
1. “I don’t have the money to study abroad.”
You don’t have the money to study abroad? Really? That’s pretty strange because most college students’ bank accounts are simply overflowing with extra cash, even after they’ve paid for their tuition out of pocket. Yeah, right! All sarcasm aside, nobody really has extra money to study abroad. But nobody has the money to go to college, either, and that doesn’t stop us from taking out loans. We do it because we know that the education and experiences are well worth the cost.
So studying abroad should be placed in the exact same category as college: a worthwhile investment in your future. Besides, there are plenty of colleges that offer complete tuition exchanges (meaning all the scholarships and government aid that you receive in the States apply overseas), and most study abroad programs offer internal scholarships as well. Even the government wants you to study abroad, with options like the Fullbright Scholarship available for certain qualified applicants.
2. “If I study abroad, I won’t be able to graduate on time.”
This excuse is very common among today’s ueber-stressed college students. They feel pressure from all angles – professors, parents, and society in general – to follow a strict plan and graduate within four years, regardless of what opportunities this plan forces them to pass up. This is a bad excuse for several reasons.
First of all, almost every university worldwide has the classes you need to graduate. Unless your major is incredibly specialized and you’ve already fulfilled all of your gen-ed credits, you will be able to find classes abroad that will help you graduate. Whether you need creative arts, mathematics, science, or humanities credits, you’ll probably be able to take them abroad, and, thanks to globalization, many of these classes will even be taught in English!
And if you can’t find any classes abroad to help you graduate, consider this: Is one extra semester really that big of a deal? Think about the job market you’re rushing to enter. Is it really all that enticing? Also, remember that employers value well-rounded applicants, so, at the very least, studying abroad is a resume booster.
3. “Studying abroad is a waste of time and doesn’t have anything to offer me.”
This one’s actually pretty common, despite that fact that it already has many of you shaking your heads. Believe it or not, a great many students think that filling out a bit of paperwork isn’t worth the once in a lifetime opportunity of spending 6 months in a foreign country. Besides these uncommonly lazy students, others don’t mind the paperwork but believe that studying abroad doesn’t have anything to offer them.
Students of this mindset usually have a number of deeply personal reasons that all result in a variation of the following claim: “I won’t learn anything over there that I can’t learn over here.” Many of these students worry about leaving loved ones behind, and they fear that they’ll be too homesick to enjoy themselves even if they do go abroad.
Okay, it’s understandable to feel this way, but rest assured that you will not regret your decision to study abroad. There are the basic reasons, of course: You’ll have the unparalleled opportunity to simultaneously make new friends, learn a new language, try new things, experience new places, and immerse yourself in a culture so fully that when you first come home, you’ll feel like a foreigner in your own country. But beyond that, for the majority of students, studying abroad truly is a life altering experience. Studying abroad forces you to push yourself to levels of maturity and independence you never thought possible. When you return home, you’re still yourself, just a more confident and independent version.
If you still doubt the merits of studying abroad, try talking with other students who have already had the experience. Most of these students will have nothing but positive things to say about their time in a foreign country because the reality is this: The number of students who regret not taking advantage of the opportunity is many, many times greater than the number of students who regret being brave enough to hop on the plane.
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