The wayfarer way far away

“My name is Ishmael. Call me Ish.” These were the fantastic first words of my Cape Town taxi driver. I chuckled and thought to myself, “Is this what they mean when the say studying abroad will enlighten your college education?” We’ve all heard it before: Study abroad is an invaluable experience to expand your horizons (and your waistlines), to make new discoveries (like 37 uses for Huggies wipes), and to encounter new experiences (like travelers’ diarrhea). It looks great on your résumé (or your Facebook page). But such experiences can all be had by simply travelling.

Why study abroad and not just travel abroad?

Two reasons. First, the academic framework of an abroad program opens doors to a network of people, connections, and experiences that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve slept overnight at a Landless Workers Movement encampment in Brazil, have seen firsthand the complex needs of slums and informal settlements, and spoken in person with HIV patients, Green Party politicians, gender justice activists, university professors, and small-business entrepreneurs. Transgressing all of these social, economic, political, and lingual boundaries was possible only because of the academic platform. The second reason, while it may seem strange and counterintuitive, is the more important facet of the experience: dependence. It’s all too easy, at your home institution, to recline into a lifestyle of independence and auto-sufficiency. But this is a dangerous guise. People need people, everywhere and all the time. And this reality is most manifest for the student in a strange land. In my particular program of 32 students, we depend on each other for everything—for cultural adjustment; for booking hostels; for borrowing a toothbrush/swiss army knife/hug/course reader/power adaptor and/or taxi fare. We are more than just peers, and we are more than just friends­­—we are fellows.

Pause for a moment and think about your academic portrait. You can quote Virgil or Foucault, you have a favorite Greek play, and you can prove what X equals. You know how to analyze, theorize, and problematize. You can speak fluent Academese . . . in French! But your $200,000 brain ain’t worth a damn if it just sits and rots in the comfort and ease of the familiar. A mind is not made from what it knows, but from it seeks to understand. The beautiful mind is the one that most often embarrasses itself with the active acknowledgment of what it does not know. That is why studying abroad is imperative—to encounter your own ignorance.

And what an adventure this can be. This semester I’m tromping around five countries on four continents for four months to study cities. I’ve ridden rickshaws, horses, planes, and trains. I’ve frolicked in the African veld, climbed a mountain and stood above the clouds, and spent entire weekends gazing at waterfalls. I’ve haggled, sweet talked, bargained, and bribed. I’ve danced with Brazilian outlaws, sat down to dinner with communists, and gone to happy hour with 85-year-old neoliberals. I’ve learned that some things are universal: love, Coca-Cola, poverty, and Justin Bieber. And I’m re-evaluating things I once took for granted: what to do with used toilet paper, the definition of violence, and how to wet a stamp. All of this has happened in the space of three months so far abroad, and all of this is not possible in a Columbia classroom.

There is the unfortunately popular belief that studying in New York City negates the necessity of multicultural encounter elsewhere. But for the brave, wise few who make the decision to go, the result is most often priceless.

In short, don’t just study—study abroad. If for no other reason, do it to meet new people, to miss the old ones, and to have a place to return to, so that you would re-enter our campus community as a changed person, a renewed student, and with an enlightened life, with a whale of a tale to tell.

The author is a Barnard College junior majoring in history. This semester she is studying in Brazil, South Africa, and Vietnam, and this piece was written on her cell phone in Cape Town.