Alyssa Snider holds Mabenaa, a girl she met while visiting a school in Ghana.
For some students, returning to this country after a year or semester abroad means seeing home in a completely different way.
At least it did for senior Marlon Copeland, who studied abroad in Nice, France, last semester with the Maryland-in-Nice program. He got a new perspective on issues he felt desensitized toward while growing up in this country, he said.
“When you leave your own country, you can really reflect back on it,” the French and government and politics and major said. “You can never really know what it is without having left it.”
The mass killings and reckless shootings that have plagued this country’s news were prominent in the French media, Copeland said, making this country seem violent and dangerous to citizens of other nations.
“We’re kind of numb to it now, it’s almost like a daily thing,” he said. “[Being abroad] put it back into perspective how ridiculous it is.”
Learning and experiencing life abroad can give students a greater understanding of the world but can sometimes alienate them from friends who have stayed on the campus, said Lauren Ruszczyk, assistant director of advising and outreach for Education Abroad. Some returning students who are enthusiastic to share their experiences struggle with their family’s or friends’ lack of interest or understanding, she said. Education Abroad has staff members and peer mentors who can talk to students to help them reflect on their time abroad and readjust back to on-campus life.
“Students get a better sense of how people live in different locations, and they return feeling that others aren’t as aware of that with their heightened knowledge after their experience,” she said.
This university had 1,572 undergraduate students participate in a study-abroad program during the 2013-14 academic year, which is about 6 percent of the student population, according to Education Abroad. And on a national scale, 1.4 percent of students nationwide studied abroad during the 2011-12 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors Report, Ruszczyk said.
Some students seem to better understand the good and bad parts of this country and their host countries from traveling abroad and notice that every country in the world has issues that need to be addressed. Copeland also noted instances of discrimination he observed in France, mainly toward people of Middle Eastern descent.
“When I looked at France, too, I saw that it’s not us who have these issues,” Copeland said. “Being there changed my view of the U.S., and seeing that we’re not the worst, everybody has their thing.”
It’s also hard to truly appreciate the conveniences this country enjoys until a student can compare it with what’s available abroad, said senior communication and government and politics major Jonathan Lee, who spent eight weeks interning for the State Department in Belize this summer.
“I never really realized how much we have; you don’t really realize that until you go abroad,” he said. “Even just going to one store — in Belize, you had to go to multiple stores to get what you wanted.”
Even though it might be boring to come back to the work and school routine when returning home from time abroad, remaining curious about the world will keep things interesting wherever you may be, Lee said.
“You can always find something interesting about where you are, even if you’re home,” he said. “Keeping that traveler mindset about you and exploring your surroundings as if you were in a different country — I feel like that makes everything more fun for me when I come back. It helps to keep that sense of wonder.”
