02 Dec Go At Your Own Pace

Go At Your Own Pace

Studying abroad comes with the expectation of being ‘the best year of your life’, and with this expectation comes a lot of pressure. It comes with a lot of pressure to drink the most alcohol, go to the craziest parties, meet the most people and see the most beautiful things. I however, think that the year abroad is most valuable for an entirely different reason: it tests your ability to recognise that you are your own person, and you don’t need to fulfill the expectations of others in order be valuable.

Whilst studying abroad provides you with so many incredible opportunities to sink bevvies with a bunch of new people and explore beautiful places, there is nothing more satisfying than stumbling across these moments in a natural and authentic way. The pressure to live up to the ideology that this year is ‘the best year’ of your life, can be a daunting prospect once you arrive and find yourself lost among a sea of students, all trying to fulfill this same desire. Groups of internationals all with the same intention: finding friendships, indulging in adventures and making memories of beautiful moments.

So what happens in-between these moments?

Usual reality, of course. We still have to negotiate with missing family and friends, we still have to overcome fears of being lonely, fears of wasting time, fears of not doing well enough, fears of not coping well enough. We are still ourselves. And that’s the point. In order to get the most out of this experience as an exchange student, it is imperative to remain true to yourself. All the pressures of comparing how amazing your experience is to another’s and assessing your personal progress alongside another’s, they are pressures we face wherever we are in the world, at any given age. As an exchange student this pressure is intensified, because we hold on to this expectation, ‘it will be the best year of your life’. The truth of the matter is though, no-one other than you can really measure what that actually means. If your idea of a valuable experience doesn’t fit the mold of the majority, it doesn’t mean that you are doing something wrong or that you should change your ways. You are responsible for yourself and what you want to achieve whilst you’re here; this is the beauty of choosing to study abroad, because in this new environment we are forced to recognise the things that are most important to us, and we are forced to see that these things are enough, regardless of what others try to have us believe.

It’s easy to feel frustrated when you look around and see big differences between how you are choosing to spend your time and how others are. Meeting your own basic needs in this situation can sometimes make you feel inadequate, as though you are not doing the year abroad ‘well enough’. But remember that this year isn’t about fulfilling what others expect of you, it is about growing as an individual and creating experiences that support you and your priorities. If that means that you don’t follow the crowd it is not necessarily a bad thing, but a sign that you are choosing yourself over the pressure to conform to an expectation.

We are all different people, with different backgrounds and different intentions, so naturally we will all approach the year abroad very differently. It is this that makes the year abroad ‘the best year of our lives’, because among the sea of international students with the same desire, there is a multitude of paths and opportunities to help each individual get there in their own way.

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The next time you catch yourself worrying if you’re doing this whole thing ‘right’, tell yourself that as long as you’re doing the things that make you happy and are pushing yourself in the ways that you were hoping to push yourself, then yes, you are fucking on it!