I’ve been thinking a lot lately on my time abroad in Bremen, Germany last year. Maybe I have just been feeling nostalgic, or maybe I am excited to go back to Germany now that I have received a Fulbright Grant, but recently I have been reflecting a lot on what I learned from my experiences there.
When you prepare to go abroad, people will tell you all sorts of things. For example, I often heard that “this will be the best experience you’ll ever have,” or “I bet this will change your life.” I acknowledge that going abroad was undoubtedly one of the greatest privileges, and feel so grateful that I was able to spend a year in another part of the world.

However I do find the idea problematic that many people, and even students, claim that the experience will transform their personality indefinitely, or that their time abroad will become the best time of their entire lives. Saying something will be “the best,” the ultimate of all other times, disallows the possibility that any experience has the potential to be great. “The best,” as I see it, is a kind of ending: after something has been declared the best, nothing similar can ever be as good. No experience should be that extremized.

Moreover, it is perhaps illusory for students to go into studying abroad with the thought that they will return as a changed individual. When you leave, you bring your experiences with you, and you share with others what has shaped you into the person you are. While there, you learn to see what you know through a different lens – different cultures, lifestyles, and even languages all offer a new perspective on the world around you. You adapt – being there is an assimilation, not necessarily a full integration. And upon return, that world view travels alongside you, a way for you to filter the familiar with the learned. The things you gain abroad are an addition – not a consumption.

I think the belief that studying abroad will somehow change everything, and create a different totality of you as a person, offers a lot of pressure to students who are already unsure of what to expect. They may fear that their time won’t live up to the presuppositions that either they, or others, expect. In the year before I went abroad, I was skeptical of columns I read that declared every experience as life changing.

The idea may seem obvious, but I think people tend to forget it: the majority of living abroad is based on the idea of living in the truest sense of the word. Not every day is going to offer insightful moments; a lot of daily life consists of cooking, doing work, buying groceries, and other sometimes mundane activities. But that is ultimately what a meaningful time abroad means: appreciating both the exciting times of travel and living abroad, and the smaller, quieter moments of everyday life. After all, the latter are the moments that make you become temporarily a part of the country, and the country permanently become a part of you.