Haverford Exchange

collegemom3717
Wed, 23 Mar 2016 14:10:59 +0000

@lime20002001, I have re-framed this answer a few times. At the end of the day, though, the answer to your core question (which I understand to be, ‘is there any way that this year abroad could be worth it?’) is yes, it could be. Whether it would be depends on a lot of factors, but mostly 1) how much of a financial burden it would genuinely be for you and 2) how much your son maximizes the experience.

But as none of us knows anything about you or your son, it isn’t possible to really say more than that. When I look at your criteria:

a diverse student body, was culturally enriching and/or provided with them with experiences, insights and perspectives that enhanced their career prospects.

I don’t know if you are somebody who believes that “American culture” is an oxymoron, or a city person who can’t picture how a suburb of a small city can compare to living in an actual main city such as Edinburgh (I know that population isn’t everything, but it is ~1.3m v ~500K).

When you ask if this could actually have a tangible, career-type benefit, I don’t know if your son is studying a science and might be looking at grad school, or an English Lit major who doesn’t know quite what to do after college. If the former, it very well could help, the latter maybe not so much.

When you ask how

attending a small closely knit liberal arts college

could be good for your son, I don’t know if you are somebody who doesn’t know much about LAC’s (an unfamiliar model to a lot of people outside the US) or a Mom concerned about her son being an outsider in a closed group. When you ask if this can be more than a boodoggle I don’t know if your history with your son suggests that it might be, or if you can’t see how the US educational system can add anything to what he already has.

IMO, it’s all but impossible to know what our kids will make of, or take away from, an experience. I know an Edinburgh student who did an exchange at the University of Richmond a couple of years ago. She found it much harder than she expected- especially the amount of continuing assessment work- and was not a happy camper for the whole first term. It got better in the second term, and now she looks back on it and says that she can see a number of things that came from the experience that she hadn’t expected. I know an Irish student who got an amazing summer internship, that turned into a job after she finished university- through the mother of a person she studied with. I know an Edinburgh student who will be starting a (fully-funded) PhD program in the US, helped by the letter of recommendation from her professor at Edinburgh- and one from her professor at her year-abroad university, with whom she did research. And I know people who had an absolute ball on their study abroad (in Australia, various European countries & the US) and have nothing to show for it except some rather dubious pictures and stories that they can’t tell their parents!