by Dr. Maria Doyle
Midway through my undergraduate summer in Düsseldorf, Germany, I tried to go to a movie. After several weeks working in the back room of a bank, my German came much more comfortably than it had on my arrival, so when the woman behind the ticket window asked whether I was sixteen, I confidently responded, “Nein!” (I was 20.) It didn’t occur to me that there was a reason she’d asked; I was used to having my age mistaken. But when she wouldn’t sell me a ticket, I found myself in the middle of a moment of cultural translation: “sixteen” didn’t register as significant to me initially because “seventeen” is the magic number for admission to R-rated films in the U.S. Thus, although I understood the literal words, I didn’t immediately understand the cultural context that gave them meaning. I did catch on, however, and I did explain my actual age. And I did get my movie ticket. But even such a trivial bit of cultural data – a one year difference in defining “maturity” – was important for what it revealed to me about how living in another country teaches one not just to speak with a different vocabulary but also to understand how much individuals are shaped by the culture that surrounds them.
My experience in Germany that summer remains, twenty-five years later, a pivotal and transformative moment. It contained a lot of firsts – first time out of the country, first time on an airplane, first medieval cathedral, first time feeling like a citizen of the world – but each of those firsts led to a next step that shaped the academic, professional and personal life that would follow in ways I couldn’t imagine while I was marveling at Gothic arches and annoying the grocery clerk by not bringing my own bag for my purchases. When I came back to the U.S., I could put on my resume that I’d worked in a German bank, but I’d also gained confidence in my abilities, proven that I could manage new situations on my own and seen that the way I’d always done things wasn’t necessarily the way they had to be done. Those are life lessons that were intensified by the fact that they occurred thousands of miles away from friends and family in a cultural context so different from my own.
Like me, many students at UWG have never left the country before they sign up for a study abroad program, and like me, many also experience their first airplane flight as an eight-hour trans-Atlantic (or eighteen-hour trans-Pacific) journey. Like me, most of our students who want to study abroad also require some financial assistance to make that aspiration a reality. I know the value of that experience first-hand and how it can transform our students’ lives. Every student who returns not just with pretty pictures of faraway places – stay tuned for those later in the summer – but with a new perspective on themselves right here and now shows why it is important that our institution provide the many wonderful opportunities it does for them to have meaningful experiences abroad. And it is essential that we continue to provide them with a measure of financial assistance and guidance to help them take advantage of the opportunity.
Research shows that students who study abroad have high graduation rates. They develop soft skills, like the ability to communicate effectively and solve problems, that employers want to see. And their worlds become just a little bit bigger, which makes them more active and productive contributors to the global community, whether they ultimately go out to join that community elsewhere or instead work to build it in Georgia.
Dr. Maria Doyle is the director of the International Services and Programs Office.
