Travel-and-Leisure
A Study of Oneself
Expose yourself to a foreign culture and study your subjects, and yourself, at the same time.
Are you a university student somewhere in our globalized world? Do you want to study in a foreign culture? The excitement of being in new cultures results in thousands of students to travel across the world. One advantage of such an experience which is not often talked about, is that the travelling student also gets a hard-to-find opportunity to know him- or herself from a new perspective. It is an opportunity to see how one can manage when coming alone to a new culture, as a representative of the culture ?back home?. This is even better due to the development of cooperation skills with people with different cultural backgrounds.
When travelling as a student to another country, where there are different rules and guidelines for university studies, one can feel that life in general, and studies in particular, become more intensive. Without the safety of being in the safety of the cultural sphere in the home country, it is easy to start comparing one?s own behaviour with the new and unknown. Strengths and weaknesses in the personality that usually fall into the category ?normal behaviour? become very noticeable when the rug, the origin, is pulled away from under one?s feet, and the floor, the world, is exposed in it?s many different nuances.
Naturally, this is not an unusual phenomenon, when we look at the second generation of immigrants and everyone with some kind of external cultural influence in their families. Even if the place chosen for the studies is the childhood home it is simple to notice the small changes of a new cultural setting. Those are the changes that lead to new types of discussions and even more-so, to new developments of discussions. This is of course also related to social competence and the nature of the studies at hand. For a person who has not tried something new, culturally speaking, it is common to neglect to notice the differences between cultural behaviour and personal behaviour. In the long run, one?s own cultural identity affects, or rather, defines everyday life as much as personality.
If the meeting with a new culture leads to a professional or personal development, it is something well worth the time to explore. Even so, it is a fun experience.
Paul-Christian M
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