Somehow, over the past decade or so, studying abroad stopped being an opportunity and started becoming an expectation. For many college students, “I studied abroad” is now less of an interesting fact and more of a box to check. You go abroad for a semester, travel to as many countries as possible, take an excessive number of pictures and come home and talk about how it was “the best semester of your life.” If you haven’t gone yet, someone will inevitably ask you where you’re planning to go.
And if you say you’re not planning to study abroad? You might as well have announced that you don’t like fun.
I am not anti-study abroad. In fact, I am probably the least qualified person to make that argument. I studied abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, and it was one of the most meaningful experiences of my college career. I also had the privilege of traveling as much as I could while I was there.
But I think we should ask ourselves why studying abroad has become something that so many students feel they are supposed to do.
My semester abroad was not exactly the leisurely European adventure that most college students seem to have. I was working roughly 30 to 35 hours a week with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees while taking classes at night. I spent my time studying international law and international organizations while working on issues directly related to the career I hope to pursue. It was exhausting. At times, it was overwhelming. But I would not change a thing.
That distinction is important. I did not study abroad because I thought college students were supposed to study abroad. I did it because the opportunity directly connected to what I wanted to learn, the work I wanted to do and the career I wanted to pursue. That, to me, is what college opportunities should be about.
Increasingly, however, it feels like college has become an exercise in collecting experiences. We collect internships, leadership positions, extracurriculars, research opportunities, study-abroad destinations and, of course, the photographs that prove we did all of them.
Study abroad fits particularly well into this culture because it is both an educational experience and a social one. Saying that you spent a semester in another country carries a certain amount of cultural capital and frequently acts as a symbol of financial privilege.
Studying abroad is not equally accessible to everyone. Even when tuition and financial aid remain comparable to a semester at home, there are flights, passports, housing arrangements, food, visas and the opportunity cost of spending a semester away from a job, internship or other responsibility. Once you arrive, there is also an entire culture of weekend travel that can make the “study-abroad experience” considerably more expensive than simply choosing to study in another country.
This creates a strange contradiction. We tell students that studying abroad is an opportunity available to them while simultaneously creating a culture in which it can feel like an experience they need to have in order to keep up. However, not everyone can keep up, which in some cases could backfire, creating an unenjoyable semester.
There is also something strange about the way we talk about life abroad more generally. It is increasingly common to hear young Americans talk about moving permanently to Europe, living somewhere else or escaping the United States entirely. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live abroad. I understand the appeal; after all, I chose to spend a semester doing exactly that.
But I do think there is a tendency to romanticize the idea of living somewhere else without considering what it actually means to build a life there. A four-month stay in a beautiful European city, surrounded by other students and supported by a university program, is very different from building a career, paying rent and navigating a completely different social and legal system. There is nothing wrong with wanting either experience, but we should be careful about confusing the experience we want with the experience we think we are supposed to want.
My semester in Geneva taught me that studying abroad can be incredibly valuable. It gave me academic experiences I could not have replicated in Hamilton. It connected my coursework to my career goals. It introduced me to people and institutions I had spent years reading about. And it challenged me in ways that I genuinely wanted to be challenged. But it also taught me something else: studying abroad is not inherently valuable simply because it is abroad. The value came from what I was doing there.
That distinction gets lost when study abroad becomes a box to check. If the primary reason you want to spend a semester abroad is because everyone else is doing it, because you are afraid of missing out or because you think you need an impressive answer when someone asks what you did in college, maybe it is worth stopping to ask yourself what you actually want from the experience.
College is supposed to be a period of figuring out what matters to you. That should include figuring out which opportunities are actually meaningful to you — not simply collecting the experiences that look impressive from the outside.
So, by all means, study abroad. Travel. Live somewhere new. Take the opportunity if it genuinely excites you. But don’t do it because you think you’re supposed to. You don’t need a passport stamp to prove that you made the most of college.
