What Studying Abroad Can Do for You... If You Do It Right

My best friend studied abroad in London the semester before me. When she came back, her stories were all about catching the Tube and going out to clubs and spending gobs of money on shoes she called her "purple England kicks."

I began to dream about what my time in England would be like. Granted, I wasn't staying in London, but I was only a three-hour train ride outside of it. People who had studied before me in the hamlet of Ormskirk, England told me it was so much like being at our small-town home college, Truman State University located in Kirksville, Missouri, that they called it Ormskirksville.

But I had seen the brochures for Edge Hill College and brochures don't lie! I knew the town had a nightclub. The school had a bar/nightclub on campus. And somehow I would find my way to airports so I could make cheap weekend escapes with EasyJet and Ryan Air.

When the van transporting myself and five other naïve American students from the airport pulled into Edge Hill's parking lot, my heart sunk. We were in the middle of a field. I didn't see a town. The dorms were old and dark. Totally unlike the beautiful picture of a building in the brochure. We would later find out that the photo we had assumed was a dorm was actually a picture of the new Student Rec Center that had been placed, for some reason, under the heading "accommodations."

If I learned one thing from studying abroad, it was that everything is not always as it seems.

Aside from in-room sinks that spewed forth black gunk, campus cafeterias that didn't serve us food on Saturdays or Sundays, a campus library that closed early on weeknights and even earlier on weekends, and only Americans and Brits at the college - I expected to congregate with more international students - studying abroad really did have its great moments. Using the whole campus to play nightly games of Manhunt (hide-and-go-seek for big kids) with other students. Cheap airfare. Cheap train fare. Everything within arms-reach if you just took the time to get it.