Study Abroad Advisor

Programming for Reentry

Issues and Solutions for Study Abroad Returnees

By Stacey Woody

While most study abroad professionals are now aware of the importance of including crosscultural re-entry in our study abroad programming, this can get pushed aside and seem less pressing than pre-departure programming. It can also be difficult to draw students to attend re-entry workshops or receptions. Nevertheless, it is our responsibility as study abroad professionals not to ignore the issues that students have to deal with during their reentry after study abroad.

Personal Growth and Change

While abroad, most students experience challenges to their values, beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews. This often results in profound learning and changed individuals. The difficult part for the students is fitting their "new" selves into their old environments. Students express feelings of alienation, frustration, disorientation, and even identity crisis. They often say they are quite happy with their personal changes, but do not know how to fit them into their former lifestyle.

Invite students in your re-entry workshop to develop a personal list of positive changes in themselves resulting from study abroad-- changes that they wish to hold onto in their lives at home. Encourage them to refer back to the list when necessary. Encourage journal writing as another positive outlet for expressing their personal changes.

New Knowledge and Skills

During the study abroad experience, students have developed foreign language skills, new knowledge within their academic discipline, new research skills, and new problem-solving skills, to name only a few. Frustration comes from feeling there is no application in the home environment for what they have learned.

Help students identify outlets on campus for utilizing their newly developed intercultural skills. For example, encourage involvement with international students or the international community in your city. Let professors know which students in their courses or departments went abroad so they can draw upon the students' experiences for class discussions, papers, and presentations.

Relationships with Family, Friends

This re-entry issue can result from several factors: no one is particularly interested in hearing about the study abroad experience; students themselves have difficulty conveying the significance of the experience; and, finally, students often feel that family and friends are pressuring them into being the "same person" as before they went abroad. Returnees express feelings of alienation.

It is most important to help students realize that there are people who are excited to hear about every detail of their study abroad experience. Putting returnees in touch with each other and with prospective study abroad students facilitates the outlet for sharing the experience.

Adjusting to the Home Campus

Many study abroad returnees say they have difficulty adjusting to the home campus. After studying abroad in a different educational system, students can find the home campus to be limiting and narrow. They can become annoyed with the perceived obsession with grades and competitiveness. Also, students who study abroad learn both formally and informally--coming back to the home campus and traditional academia can seem uninteresting compared to this "other" form of learning.

Keeping students informed about news on campus can help them to feel more connected with the campus while they are away. Many study abroad offices coordinate mailings to students abroad to inform them of registration procedures; it is quite simple (and appreciated) to include a campus newspaper in this mailing. Facilitate ways students can share their experiences with the campus community. For example, encourage returnees to write articles on study abroad for the campus newspaper.

Re-adjusting to a Lifestyle

It is often especially difficult for students who studied abroad in cultures very different from the dominant U.S. culture to re-adjust to life at home. They feel stressed by the pace of life, overwhelmed by consumermism, and in some cases even guilty.

Again, help students to seek out situations in which they can use their new intercultural skills; help them to find places where their international experiences are appreciated and respected. Facilitate students' involvement in the international club on campus, for example. Another way to help students address this issue is to encourage them to think about their return home as another intercultural experience.

Dealing with Responsibilities

After the study abroad semester or year, students often return home to face life responsibilities like summer jobs or internships, changing their major, or the Big Question: what to do after graduation. Some students admit they have postponed making those decisions while abroad; others have given them extensive thought and have made major life decisions. Either way, the stress can aggravate other pressures that students deal with in re-entry.

Support students seeking other international or intercultural experiences by developing a resource library of opportunities for work, volunteer, or teaching abroad and by conducting workshops in these areas in cooperation with the career services office on your campus.

Remember that each student's re-entry experience is unique, and we should treat it as such. However, it is important to be aware of the general issues so that we can, along with our students, come up with practical and positive ways of addressing them. Although re-entry can be a time of confusion, frustration, and stress, it is important to remember that this phase is a natural and normal part of the cross-cultural adjustment cycle, and it is also the time when most students realize the significant impact their study abroad experience has made on their lives.

Re-Entry Issues and Solutions

Issues for Returnees

Helping Students Cope

1. Personal growth and change.

Help students to identify positive changes in themselves.
Encourage journal writing.

2. New knowledge and skills.

Help students identify outlets on campus for utilizing intercultural skills.
Inform professors of students who went abroad.

3. Relationships with family/friends.

Help returnees get in touch with each other.
Establish a system for prospective students to contact returnees.

4. Adjustment to home school.

Keep students abroad informed about campus news.
Facilitate ways students can share experiences with campus community.

5. Adjustment to lifestyle change.

Help students seek out situations where their intercultural experiences are appreciated.
Encourage students to think about return home as another intercultural experience.

6. Dealing with life responsibilities.

Conduct a workshop on working abroad.
Develop a resource library of other international opportunities.

STACEY WOODY is Coordinator of Off-Campus Study, Middlebury College. Her Master's thesis at the School for International Training was on "Preparing College Semester Abroad Students for Re-Entry." KEVIN PARKER is a Study Abroad Peer Adviser at the Univ. of Vermont.