A week ago I was one of the alumni guests invited back to Penn State University to participate in Penn State’s Global Careers Institute. Whilst the core sessions were about varied topics on getting employed overseas; the breakout times and dinners were all about networking and the young women I was sat with really wanted to know the broader implications on moving abroad.
This article from Harvard Business Review talks about some of the empirical data on how living abroad impacts self and it compelled me to write down some of the advice I gave the students I met.
If you choose to move abroad; do not surround just yourself with other Americans doing the same. This only serves to exacerbate your feelings of homesickness and keep you isolated from the country you are trying to make home. That’s not to say you should pretend not to be American. But my first six months were rough, I was 22 and had never been to London and found it incredibly lonely and difficult. But then I ended up hanging out with Americans I would not have been friends with in America. And doing so cut me off from meeting people that would eventually become my urban family.
Also, one of the huge benefits of working in Europe is that six weeks of holiday a year is pretty standard, and you are expected to take it. English people hoard days off like nothing I had ever seen in the states; and I am here for it. But if you spend every day of those six weeks trying to fly home to not miss every birthday, christening and occasion; then you might as well have stayed in Northern New Jersey.
Don’t travel like an American. Travel is not about checklists; it isn’t about kissing the Blarney Stone or rubbing Juliet’s breast in Verona. It is not about hitting 30 countries by the time you turn 30 (which I did). It’s about quality rather than quantity. Go a few blocks away from the main tourist attraction and talk to locals. Watch, observe, taste things you could never find at home. Learn from the towns and airbnb hosts that welcome you in.
You will miss things. You will miss people. You will miss births and you will miss deaths. I spent the six years my mom was dying straddling both worlds and failing miserably. There are huge costs emotionally to deciding to put three thousand miles between you and your loved ones; there are also huge benefits.
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