Dear Reader,
Think of me as your Study Abroad savant, your travelling guru (who really knows nothing about anything, but seems to have survived a year studying on the other side of the world).
Survived and, annoyingly, enjoyed it.
Let me rewind. Just over a year ago, I stood at the very beginning of the most expansive year of my life. A suitcase fifteen kg overweight, an approved Visa, and enrolment confirmation from the University of Melbourne—and off I went on the twenty-three-hour journey Down Unda.
Before arriving in Australia, it never felt like an actual place someone could go. It existed only on my TV, in the form of Bondi Rescue and Ja’mie: Private School Girl, so when I arrived at eleven PM in the dead of Melbourne winter,you can imagine my surprise. I stood at Arrivals, totally alone and positively under-dressed, and thought: What the hell have I done?
If you’re considering a year abroad, or are on one now, be sure this same thought will come. What is comforting though; it passes almost immediately.
What nobody tells you is that the first few weeks are mostly logistics wearing a raincoat. Bank accounts. Phone plans. Which tram goes where, and why it’s somehow always the one you’re not on. My first day brought Kmart (Aussie B&M), a few pots and pans, and a pillow. I hauled it back on the tram through the CBD with the boy I’d met that morning in the lobby who, unbeknownst to me, turned out to be one of my greatest friends.
After the first ten days, the jetlag subsides and you begin to feel like a real, working human again. This time will include new coffee shops, a few flat parties and maybe even a walk around campus – don’t stress this part though, you have a whole year to sit in lecture theatres.
As humanities students, and especially Liberal Arts, we’re often asked what we’ll “do with” our degrees. What is true is that going abroad teaches you exactly how valuable an interdisciplinary way of learning is. My modules at Melbourne spanned across History, Film, Gender studies, Journalism and Indigenous studies—none of which possible without the flexibility of my degree. I found myself reading, writing and learning in a place with a completely different relationship to its own history, and expanded my arguments with voices that had never been in conversation before.
That is perhaps the secret gift of studying abroad as a humanities student, you are not simply studying culture, but standing inside a new one, learning the intricacies of its politics, economy and society, and how you are beginning to fit inside it.
Aside from the academics, and perhaps more importantly, are the people you’ll meet and the places you’ll go. One of the coolest things about moving abroad is that it puts the rest of the world surprisingly within reach. Over the year, I made it to over seven countries, including New Zealand, Fiji, Vietnam and Hong Kong. You don’t need to do all of them. You don’t need to do half, but if the chance appears, take it. Your future self will be insufferable at dinner parties, but isn’t that the fun of it!
Solo travelling landed me on a tiny island off mainland Fiji, with a backpack and hair the size of Hagrid’s in ninety-eight percent humidity. Despite getting caught in a category four cyclone, on what was essentially a sand bank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I met a girl who I now speak to daily. She lives on the other side of the world, yet we still laugh on the phone about that time we were close to death in a flooded Fijian hostel.
It’s friendships like these that you’ll come away with, alongside a newfound confidence to talk to strangers and a much looser grip on what the perfect trip looks like (trust me, some hostel experiences will make you never take a family holiday for granted again).
If I could bottle one lesson, it’s this one. You will feel homesick, and there are sure to be days when loved ones couldn’t feel further away. But a week later, you’ll realise you’ve gone a whole afternoon without thinking about it, and suddenly you’re not that desperate to fly back after all. Both are normal. Neither mean you’re doing it wrong.
If I’m honest, reader, I still know very little about how to navigate a visa form or why Burger King is Hungry Jacks in the Southern hemisphere. But what I can tell you is that the version of you who boards the plane won’t be the one who comes back – and that’s the point. If you’re on the fence about whether to go abroad, or maybe already there and wondering if it’s all for you, don’t look back.
Explore, get miserably lost, and revel in being the one walking in the future when no one at home is awake yet.
And if you find yourself in Melbourne, have a drink at The Evelyn for me. That place has a mean student discount and some of my very best Sunday afternoons.
words and images by Chiara Shuman
