Abroad
Changing Homes
At Harvard you are, in many ways, at home. You form routines: waking up at the same time, eating in the dining hall, and studying for classes in particular spots. You begin to recognize the same people walking to classes on the same pathways. You become comfortable with friends, and even with people you don’t particularly like but who have become woven into the fabric of your time here. You begin to be comforted by simple things—red bricks with white trimmings, bells ringing on the hour, strange radiator noises, that section kid’s questions—so subtly you don’t even realize you’re being comforted until they’re gone.
Studying abroad changes that.
Academic Worries
As someone who has studied abroad, I’ve often gotten pushback from other Harvard students about making that decision. “You only have eight semesters at the best university in the world—why would you spend one of those away?”
It is true that most study abroad programs will not be as academically rigorous as Harvard. Excluding Oxford and Cambridge, even if your classes abroad are rigorous, you won’t have the same wealth of academic resources that you do at Harvard. You won’t have Widener, the Peabody museum artifacts, the world-renowned professors providing feedback on your work. You won’t have the brilliant guest lecturers or the intellectual energy that encompasses Cambridge. (You also won’t be surrounded by other Harvard students, which is both positive and negative).
Kineticism and Rest
In the autumn of 2015, Austin Mueller ’17 rode the Hershey railroad to a regional capital in Cuba. Originally the aristocracy’s train to the plantations, it’s now owned by the Cuban government. “On the way,” he explained, “there was an explosion; the train broke and almost derailed. Then, the conductor took off his conductor shirt, ran into the woods, and came back with his friend and a pickup truck, and they offered us a ride in front of the hotel, and they were offering us homemade rum. And what I noticed during the stop was how people were so selfless and willing to help: even if people knew nothing about engineering, they were asking what they could do.” Study abroad is like that - always moving in unexpected ways, but differently, more fluidly, than Harvard. A train stops, and people don’t grumble, but offer to help.
That same autumn in Morocco, I traveled from Rabat to Fez at dusk in a busy, crowded train where I met an engineer with no job prospects. The next day, we walked through the clamoring marketplace full of tourists, past camel-leather belts, hands of Fatima, meters of fabric, to the alleyway shop of a nomadic herbalist. A group of teenage boys offered me a flower, and I carried it past centuries-old buildings and pristine gardens with vacationing families and roses in every color. I returned from the trip by train, too, then walked back through the familiar streets of Rabat, colorful and glittering, dusty and full of cats, where I could disappear in the souk as if I belonged. I ate couscous with my host family; we talked, and we rested.