Despite the fact that I am about to drop out of my PhD program, I am obviously not treating my PhD as a study abroad of the same length.
But is there a reason the college issued a warning on day 1 of international graduate orientation that students must not treat their graduate programs as if it was a study abroad of the same length?
I never really understood why, but I guess some reasons are discipline-dependent since some disciplines (anthropology, sociology, history, and so on, so forth) require cultural immersion for research effectiveness, and physics is not one such field. However, I know, deep down, that the warning is warranted as far as my field is concerned.
I knew, on the other hand, that PhD students would probably do more cultural immersion over 5-6 years than over 1, but less cultural immersion by unit of time, and it seems that students would usually do more immersion at the research stage than at the coursework stage (again by unit of time).
I think it’s because study abroad is explicitly designed for deep cultural immersion, but PhD programs are not. Even social science disciplines that require deep cultural immersion don’t require you to do it at your university - that’s what fieldwork is for. For example, let’s say that you are from the U.S. but doing a PhD in history at Oxford. The purpose of the PhD at Oxford is not so you can get a taste of living in England and immerse yourself in English culture. It’s so you can get a PhD in history, and Oxford was the best place for you. You should in theory treat it no different from getting a PhD at Harvard or Michigan - it’s in another part of the world, but the primary goal is not for you to learn about the culture you’re living in but to complete the PhD.
If you were getting an anthropology PhD, and let’s say you were studying Latin America, cultural immersion in England (or Europe in general) wouldn’t really mean anything for you. You’d have to do your fieldwork in Latin America.