What impact did your junior year abroad have on your life after college?
Were you miserable the whole time and the big benefit was to make you appreciate your life back in the States?
Did you learn to love that country and you’ve been back multiple times since?
Did it set your career in a different direction?
Or??
I spent my junior year abroad in West Germany (Marburg) at a time when Berlin was still behind the Wall. I learned to speak German fluently, and in recent years I have returned to my interest in “German studies” and made trips to Berlin, Leipzig, and other German places.
Enhanced my ability to understand the perspectives of others.
I studied abroad three different times during my three undergraduate years. Soviet Union, Austria & Czechoslovakia with frequent travel in Germany & Italy, Hong Kong & China (PRC).
I was very satisfied with my experiences abroad & relieved to get away from the rich kid, preppy, very athletic, rural, sorority & fraternity dominated LAC (only about 2,200 students) at which I earned my undergraduate degree. (Even though I matched that description to a large extent.)
Went to law school at a large university with Division I athletics & a wide variety of students in a different region of the US. To me, this was Heaven on Earth. Allowed me to grow as an individual & to make friends from many walks of life with varied interests.
Study abroad not directly affect my career & I have not returned to any of those countries. It did, however, cause me to understand that I should have attended Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service or a similar program at a mid-size to large university. LACs, while attractive in theory & great for a semester or two, are more of a repetitive, suffocating experience rather than a growth environment in my view. At that time in my life, I just needed more than an LAC could offer.
I didn’t do a junior year abroad, but I spent a gap year in France before attending college. I also spent about a month in Germany at a Goethe Institute and living with a German woman the summer after freshman year. I was able to take literature courses in French, I translated a book about indigenous housing in Senegal for a professor. (It was mostly pictures, not a difficult translation!) My senior year I got a grant to spend the summer doing research on low-cost housing in London, Paris and Berlin. It wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t had the language skills to do it. I also ended up saying yes, when my husband asked me if he should accept a job as a post-doc in Munich. While by then my German was somewhat rusty, I was confident that I could get it back. I keep up with some of my German friends and watch German TV shows. Do less with my French, but have been back a few times.
I loved my experiences. I’m doing a sabbatical with my husband in Hong Kong now.
I couldn’t afford to study abroad, but I took a gap year before law school and backpacked through Europe for 3 months with a friend. I think it really changed my perspective on the world. It was a fabulous experience. I’ve only been back to France since then, but when I win the lottery I plan to travel back to all the places I visited.
Only a semester in England, where I got to know distant relatives much better, dipped my toe in a (slightly) foreign culture, got out of my rural/suburban bubble by living in the big city, travelled in Europe with friends and alone, read Tolkien for the first time, discovered that sometimes you can get away with not going to class and other times not so much, had big insights and life-changing moments, flirted with the law, played a ton of British Monopoly while drinking cheap wine, made bad decisions like skipping the Shakespeare play in Stratford-upon-Avon to flirt over Guinness with those cute guys at the pub, made good ones like not going with the guy trying to pick me up at the Eiffel Tower, and acquired a great phony accent that comes in useful at parties. 10/10 would recommend.
My younger son went to Jordan and met his girlfriend there. She went to college about half an hour away from him back in the states, but is actually from Hong Kong. They’ve been together forever and I think both sets of parents are hoping they will tie the knot. It’s been very nice to have almost in-laws here!
No regrets on her part.