Study abroad myths, tips and life-changing benefits

Summary

In this episode of The Search Bar, Marko Schubert, assistant director of the Office of Study Abroad at Central Michigan University, debunks study abroad myths. Marko shares his personal journey of coming to CMU as a graduate exchange student and deciding to stay. He highlights the importance of cross-cultural skills and the value of studying abroad in broadening students' worldview. He emphasizes the personal growth that students experience when they step out of their comfort zones and navigate unfamiliar situations. Marko discusses the different study abroad options available, including direct enroll programs, faculty-led programs, internships, and virtual exchanges. He also addresses concerns about cost, health and safety, and the potential impact on graduation timelines. Marko advises students to start planning early, seek financial aid and scholarships, and have conversations with their families about potential challenges and support systems. He encourages students to make an appointment with the study abroad office to discuss their options and create a plan that aligns with their academic and personal goals. 

Transcript

Chapters 

• 00:00  Introduction
• 01:12  How did Marko’s study abroad journey begin?
• 02:56  What are cultural and personal growth benefits through travel?
• 05:03  How does language play a role in study abroad?
• 06:29  What types of study abroad programs are there?
• 09:00  What are some preparation tips for studying abroad?
• 10:10  Will studying abroad delay my graduation timeline?
• 12:35  Is studying abroad expensive? Are there financial aid options?
• 14:09  What are some of the health and safety considerations?
• 18:59  What are some of the biggest challenges and adjustments while abroad?
• 21:26  What are some other expenses you might incur while abroad?
• 22:43  What are my first steps if I want to study abroad? 

Introduction

How did Marko’s study abroad journey begin?

Adam: But also, in terms of those benefits to yourself when you're volunteering, I mean, some of them can be professional. There's skills to be gained out in that field too. So, when you're working with students who are going to do some sort of volunteering, is there some attempt to align that with their professional goals? 

Adam: If you're looking to have that experience, do you have advice for students on the preparations for it, right? How soon should I start planning that trip? I know we've talked a little bit about maybe you spend a semester, take a language class, or at least get on the apps and learn the language. But what other things should you do to kind of get yourself ready?

Marko: We would like to see the students as early as possible. Even if you're not going for another year, if it's your freshman year, please come in as early as you can because it does require quite a bit of planning on the academic side as well as on the logistical side. So, if you don't have a passport yet, it's a good time to apply for one. It doesn't take forever, but it takes a couple of weeks. In some cases, a couple months, depending on what time of the year you're applying. The sooner you come in, the sooner we can look at your degree progress. We can identify classes that the students can take. We can reach out to academic advisors to maybe make changes to the degree maps. We can reach out to faculty advisors and say, hey, would these classes be good classes for you to take for your student to take while they're abroad? Because some classes are more or easier to take abroad. General electives, major electives, and some classes like Capstone, senior projects, they typically take those classes here on campus.

Will studying abroad delay my graduation timeline?

Adam: Alright, that kind of leads me into my next question, which is let's cover some of the anxiety, some of the mythology around it, if you will. And I think that would've been my first question is, is it going to delay my graduation process? It sounds like the answer to that is hopefully not.

Marko: Unless you want it to be that way. It's not. It's usually not. We work very closely, like I said, with academic advising, we make sure that we identify classes that students need to take in order to make appropriate progress toward their degree. It could be in some cases, if they go for a semester that they're missing one class, they may have to take that during the summer at CMU to make up for it. But in 99% of the cases, we make sure that they're taking the exact same classes that they would be taken here to stay on track. Now, there are programs too. I will say that we have a yearlong program in Japan, which is very popular with students who study Japanese language. CMU unfortunately does not have a major or a minor in Japanese. So, these students would really go for a year because they are so interested and so eager to study Japanese language in Japan for a year.

Adam: So that kind of puts you on maybe a little bit of a tangent, but otherwise you've noticed a lot of my students, they end load it, it's like their senior hurrah. Is that a common thing to do? Is, "this is it. It's my last semester. Now I'm going."

Marko: Some students decide to do wait until senior year because for a variety of different reasons and others are eager to go as soon as they can. The majority, I would say go between sophomore and junior year. We have a couple of freshmen every now and then. But for freshmen, it's more important, I would think, to make that transition from high school to college and get a feel for campus, get a feel for how CMU works, what kind of resources students have. So that first year is typically spent on campus, but after that they can pretty much go whenever they want. And in 2022, the spring of 2022 was the first semester that we reopened after the pandemic. That year was predominantly seniors because they had to wait for their…

Adam: They're all spending it up.

Marko: So that was a weird year in terms of distribution of academic levels. But for the most part, it's sophomores and juniors.

Adam: Alright, so you can do it whenever you want, but most people kind of do it. Mid journey for undergrads.

Is studying abroad expensive? Are there financial aid options?

Adam: Let's talk about cost then. Is it expensive? How should I expect this to affect the balance sheet in terms of planning to go being prepared for that cost?

Marko: Yeah, what we try to do is when we identify programs that we send our students to, we try to make sure that they're somewhere in the same range of cost of attendance at CMU, because our students do rely on financial aid, they do rely on scholarships. It is a big portion or a big, big part of what they think about what they're concerned about. And we try to not have excessively expensive programs. They're out there. You can certainly do those if you want to. But we also take a look at cost of living in certain areas. The cost of living in Sydney, Australia or London, England is just substantially different than living in Mount Pleasant. So that makes a big difference. But there are a lot of scholarships that are available. National scholarships, departmental scholarships within CMU. Our office alone has two scholarships that students can apply for. In some areas I think students don't really know how many scholarships are out there. So, I make that part of our job to really say, "Hey, these are there, and these are scholarships. That's free money. You don't have to pay that back. So go for that, apply for those."

Adam: There's a lot of little ones too. I think you got to do the work, but you're not the first person I've talked to who's like, "there's more little scholarships floating around out there that'll help with things like the difference in cost of tuition for going to school here or going to school in Italy," for example. 

What are some of the health and safety considerations?

Adam: So, let's talk a little bit about just health and safety, things like that. I imagine a lot of people are worried about travel, worrying about the safety that goes along with travel. Am I, I kind of joked with you that you got lost and stayed here? What's stopping them from getting lost and staying there if they didn't want to, if it wasn't intentional?

Marko: Yeah, I think travel is just by nature to a certain extent. Unpredictable. You may miss an airplane, you may miss a connection. And that's very scary in the moment. And when I have these conversations with the students, I tell 'em it's very, very stressful in the moment because you might be caught in a different country, you may have to spend a night there to make a connection the next day. Very stressful in the moment, but in the overall big picture, not that much of an interruption. But these are minor things. And then there's the unpredictable nature of anything that could happen in terms of global conflicts or in geopolitical conflicts. Until a couple of years ago, we were sending students to Russia. We had programs in Russia, and they were not crazy popular, but they existed. And every now and then we had a student who was really interested in that, mostly students who would go into international relations or something similar.

Can't do that anymore. Last summer we had students in Israel, great experience, very deeply culturally transformative experience. But unfortunately, we can't do that anymore. So, there is a risk with that. And if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's even more unpredictable than we think. It's nobody expected in 2020 that we’d have to call all of our students back. But it is unfortunately part of the reality. When I travel, I don't get as excited anymore because I do it on a regular basis. But again, these are students for the most part that have never left the country that have, some of them have never been on a plane before. And I have to constantly remind myself, "okay, don't forget that for them. That's a very, very big step."

Adam: Do you run into a lot of flight anxiety? Is that a thing you guys go through with the students or...

Marko: Not so much flight anxiety necessarily? More concerns about, "oh, I heard that there's a lot of pickpocketing in Europe." It's not something that they see here necessarily. It's not something that they struggle with domestically. But we do a lot of orientations too before the students leave. And health and safety are the biggest part by far of those orientations. So, we try to prepare them as well as we can. Country specific orientations. We have them registered for this STEP program, which is a Department of State program, which basically sends notifications to people in a certain area. So, if there were some kind of conflict, natural disaster, the State Department would then reach out to these students and say, "Hey, you may want to avoid that area. Or if it's really bad, you may make your way to the next airport and try to come home."

Adam: Come home. And are there programs in place for healthcare? Things like that. How do we make sure that students are able to see a doctor or something if they're somewhere for a semester?

Marko: Every student who participates in a CMU study abroad program automatically gets enrolled in health insurance. We have that health insurance, it's mandatory and it's very cheap. I think at the moment it's $13 per week. And we would not let students travel without that because things, you can walk on a cobblestone street in Florence, Italy, and you can slip and fall, and things can happen. You can be the healthiest individual and still things can happen. So, we make sure that they're covered. And it's not just physical health, it's also mental health of course, which plays a big role in higher education. We're all very sensitive to that topic, and that's another good reason why this insurance is mandatory.

Adam: So how do you pick, if you're a student, how would you advise 'em? If you're looking at the palette that's in front of you, and I'm going to take away the, I'm interested in Spanish or I'm interested in Italian as a language, right? Then it's obvious, right? Where do you go? How do you pick the good place to go?

Marko: It really depends. We have students that come in and say, I just want to go somewhere, so you pick a place for me, and you tell me all about that place. And if I like it, I'll go. And we have students who come in with a very defined idea of what they want to do. So, I want to go to Australia, and I don't even care if it's Melbourne or if it's Sydney. I just want to be in Australia, and I want to take classes for my major.

What are some of the biggest challenges and adjustments while abroad?

Adam: What are maybe some of the unforeseen challenges that students might face once they get to their host country? Little things that they should be prepared for that might not seem as obvious

Marko: In some cases. It's just the everyday luxuries that we have. We hear back from students, "oh, my bed is smaller in Italy, or My refrigerator is not as big as it is in my dorm." So those are things that can be adjusted relatively easily. Homesickness is a big one because a lot of students have a very tight social network here, or even safety net if you want to call that. It can just pick up the phone. And their parents, their supporters or friends and family are not that far away typically. So that's a big one that they need to understand could hit them. Even for a short-term program, you might only be gone for three weeks, but that doesn't mean that you're not going to feel homesick at some point. And another thing that a lot of people kind of forget as life goes on while you're not here, we kind of tend to think, okay, and even I do that still to this day.

I still think my parents do nothing while I'm gone. They just wake up randomly when I'm there to visit. But things happen at home too. And these are important conversations to have with your friends and family. What does happen or what do you want to do when something bad happens at home? The last thing you want to do is, or you want to have is receive a panicking phone call from a family member saying something really bad just happened. You have to have these conversations with your family, with your friends before so that they are prepared to reach out to you and say, "Hey, listen, this and this happened." So, these are things that we, I mean, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to talk about because you don't want students to be prepared for the worst possible scenarios. But at the same time, again, life does happen and it is important to tell 'em that and prepared for that.

Adam: Do you have students that work when they're on longer trips there? Is that something that happens or not typically?

Marko: Not typically, because most students are on student visas and student visas typically do not allow students to work in the country that they are in. They can volunteer, they can in turn, that's different. But these are typically not paid experiences.

What are some other expenses you might incur while abroad?

Adam: What are some of the other additional expenses that come? Do you find that students tend to live the same way that they live here on campus or are they on vacation when they're there?

Marko: I think it's a little bit of both. It does really depend on the individual student. We have students who study abroad in Italy and all of a sudden they find themselves in a different country every weekend. And sometimes I wonder how much time they really spend in their host country. Granted, travel is easy in Europe, much easier than it is here and cheaper than it is here. But we want them to understand these are additional expenses and these are not necessarily covered by your financial aid or by your scholarships because these financial aid or financial aid is intended to pay for your program expenses, not for additional travel. And of course you can't stop them from doing that. And for many of them, it's a once in a lifetime experience. They need to be careful with that because it does get very easy to hop on the next plane and see a place that you didn't intend to originally visit. But it does get expensive. And of course, souvenirs, excursions, all those kinds of things, they add up pretty quickly.

What are my first steps if I want to study abroad?

Adam: If I'm a freshman or my second semester student here at Central and I'm interested in studying abroad. What should my first steps be? Put the whole thing in a nutshell, how do I make sure that I get there?

Marko: The easiest thing is just to make an appointment with one of us. We have two advisors at the moment for programs. We advise kind of by colleges similar to the academic advisors more or less. So, make that appointment as early as you can. Like I said earlier, come in and we will look at your degree progress. We're going to take a look at what kind of courses you have left to take, what kind of degree requirements you have. And it doesn't necessarily have to be major courses. A lot of students tend to take a lot of classes in their major because that's going to be their professional career. And it makes a lot of sense to take a marketing class abroad when you're a marketing major. But you can also take general education classes or just other requirements that you have. And after that first initial appointment, we usually also refer you to academic advising to make changes to your schedule potentially. And we're also going to make sure you make a stop at OneCentral to have a conversation with them about the finances, financial aid, "what kind of financial aid can I get? What kind of scholarships are out there?" So, it sounds like a lot. It sounds like a very big process, but if you have time and you can take these individual steps, you can spread those out over the course of a semester or even a year and it's going to be a lot less stressful if you do it that way.

Adam: Yeah. And they have you guys to also let 'em know whether it's going to be South Africa or Australia or Italy or Germany or Thailand.

Marko: Correct. Right. Yeah. And then we would have these discussions that are country specific as well. So, say somebody really wants to go to Australia, we will have to have that conversation about the higher cost of living in that country because I can't deny that it's more expensive and I don't want, the last thing I want is for the student to be abroad and then struggle financially because that adds a lot more stress to them. That has a highly negative impact on their experience.

Adam: If you have a strong fear of snakes too, also

Marko: That too.

Adam: Don't show up there. Go to Italy. They don't have a lot of snakes there. They're smaller. I don't know. I don't know. Big snakes.

Marko: Ireland or Ireland. Yeah, they're supposed to have no snakes.

Adam: Yeah, they've been chased out. Right. Well, Marko, thanks so much for coming in. I really appreciate your time. It made me want to travel.

Marko: Yeah, thank you very much. It was great to be here.

Adam: Alright, awesome.

Marko: Thank you.

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