A Broad Side - Top 10 Preparations part 2

So last time we talked about what you needed to do to prepare for studying abroad. So far I said you should get your passport, plan what school you need to go to, start saving, ensure you pre-order things you want to bring, and set-up ways to communicate back home. Now we will start covering the last five things I think you should do to prepare for studying abroad.

Number 6

Okay now if you are a guy please don’t run away. The next thing on my list is… clothing. Still there? Okay the hard part for you guys is over. Now it is the girls I'll have to not scare off. Your wardrobe is going to be really small. You are going to want to set up a few outfits that can be mixed and matched to create several more outfits. Now before you start freaking out, it gets worse. Okay well actually just worse for the girls, you guys will be totally fine. If you have really bright and obvious colors people will notice when you start wearing the same thing again a lot sooner. Also you may want to limit the shoes you bring to 2. also depending on the country you may want easy to put on and take off shoes. I know in Japan I was always taking off my shoes, and not just at houses but other places too. Church, bath houses, etc. so make sure they come on and off easily or else you may go mad. For those wanting to absolutely have that larger wardrobe you have two choices. You will need to either but the clothes in country and leave them before you come back, or pay a lot of money to ship them or have extra luggage. Suit cases cannot go over 50lbs/23kg without adding an additional charge, and the suitcase's weight is included in this. Just know it adds up quick.

Shichiban

Our list is starting to get long, so here is your first easy item. Complete everything early. Sounds easy, but I bet many of you will struggle with this one. I know I did. It may sound obvious, but the main reason is that there will be several opportunities that will show up that you did not know about. You may find out later and it may change how you need to plan your trip, or if you have to spend money on something you were not expecting. Some of these opportunities may rely on you already having more things prepared. So when you can knock out tasks, paperwork, and preparation details early. Some examples of things that I needed to be pre-prepared for included; having passports for scholarships, having money for the other country's national insurance, signing up for the international student identification card (ISIC - https://www.isic.org/) having a ton of passport photoes (not just for passports surprisingly), international driver's licence (must be done in home country, and cannot be done in other country) and many more things. There will be a lot of things like this so take care of them before you get overwhelmed by the more that will come.

8

So months have gone by and you have worked out almost everything. Now you are working hard at just keeping the anxiety away before the trip. Since by now you have gotten most of your paperwork prepared, maybe you are even close enough that you have your visa too. You should make copies of everything. How you keep these is up to you; concealed flash drive, cloud storage, hidden folder. Any way you do it is fine, but you need backup copies of all of your important documents. Depending on if you have medical conditions this may include copies of these files as well. If anything happens to you there may be a need to have these, so you should be prepared by ensuring you make copies. Before I went to Japan, tragedy almost struck. A lost wallet containing a passport and all of the cash (Japanese yen)  I had to start the trip was almost never seen again. Everything turned out alright, but it can happen and if it does you need to have a way to fix it. Also back on the medical documents, turns out I needed some while I was there. Fortunately I'm like file crazy and had it, but I did not even think I was going to need it and just had it in case of emergency… I am so happy that I did.

九

Crunch time. It's the night before your plane leaves (and it leaves early in the morning) You've collected everything you think you will need and are now test loading it into your luggage at 10:00pm and you find out that it is too heavy and doesn’t even all fit in the two suitcases you have. This was me before I left. I ended up staying up somewhere between 2-4 am trying to get everything packed in time for my flight at 9am. Needless to say I slept well on the flight (actually I didn't) Trying to get all of that ready was crazy though, and for all of my preparedness I did not realize figuring out what to leave behind was going to be so hard. All of this to say DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE! Try packing your suitcase several times before hand. Remember that you may get new things you want to bring, and you may not need everything you have. If you are leaving in winter then sure wear some winter gear (on your body and on the plane as it saves space) but if not, even if it is fall don't try and bring that. If you really need it later buy it on amazon. They are almost everywhere and can sometimes surprise you where they can deliver. If you love something a whole lot do not bring it. Stuff happens, things break, get lost, and when you have gathered more things in that country that you absolutely want to bring back something else will not come back. So when you do these trial packings of your suitcases make sure to leave space as well. Or else you may end up like me before I came home from Japan, trying to decide if I should leave the amazing tea set I got there or the PS3 I brought with me. I kept both don't worry. I just got rid of all my clothes, most of which I liked.

Number 10

The final thing you should do to prepare is to remember you are going to a new country. There are going to be different rules, laws, people, ways of thinking and people will perceive things differently.  You may have differences of opinion and things may be difficult because others have a different background from you. This will happen, and there is no helping it. Take the time to learn. Learn how they think, and realize that the laws that govern you have shaped you in some ways to be who you are while theirs have done the same to them. Remember you are also a representative of your home country and college. When you do things, wherever you go people will use you to judge how they think and perceive where you are from. Also your actions can have larger ramifications than you think. Acting up could easily make it so your college is no longer able to study abroad there. It sounds like it may be a bit extreme based off of your actions alone, but this has happened before so just remember who you represent. On both of these points I have many examples, but there are far too many to isolate and share, besides that is part of the experience you are leaving to enjoy anyways. I can't teach it.

Well this concludes my top ten ways to prepare for study abroad. If you liked it please subscribe. If not then let me know what you think in the comments below. Do you have things you think are more important for preparing for study abroad? Tell me what they are.

A Broad Side - Top 10 Preparations part 1

So what do you need to before you study abroad?

Studying abroad can be difficult because you are typically planning a trip where you leave your family and everyone you know along with most of your possessions behind… well unless something terribly tragic happened to you and you have neither family nor possessions…

Before trying to take on this long and dangerous venture you should at least be able to prepare for it so you survival chances can go up. Thus here is my list of things you need to do to prepare for feeling the wrath of the league… no! stupid copyright. the list of things you need to do to prepare for studying abroad.

Numba wan

You're at school and this person comes to your class and tells you about thing interesting experience that comes with going to another country… somehow they intrigue you and you want to go. You think about it and decide you might do it a year from now. So that means you don't have to worry about preparing now doesn't it? それは違うんです。 Although you may think you don't have to do anything you actually need to start… NOW. Many of the documents required to go abroad can take months to complete and most will need to be completed months before you even study abroad, or even before you are considered for study abroad. *deep breath* So the first on my list of things to do to prepare for study abroad is get your passport. Passports at the very fastest take 2-6 weeks to get, BUT this service costs a lot more. In fact unless there is an emergency and you have a good reason to apply for a passport late, the very fastest is 6 weeks, and that is still the expediated time frame (their website say less than 6 weeks but that’s all)  cheapest expediting fees are like $60 so I wouldn’t recommend it. If you get it the routine way they say it takes more than 6 weeks. To be totally honest mine got to me faster than this, but the real reason I stress the importance of it is because some study abroad programs wont even consider you if you do not have this already, and all of them require you get it before are 100% cleared to come (plus you need it to get your visa)

Noomber twoo

Learn about the different programs your school has and what is required to go to them. And actually research it! Just hearing from someone else "oh you should go here" sounds great and convinces many people they should go to wherever that is but please, Puleeze do not do this. You need to figure out what you want out of this experience and then select the location that best suits your needs. Want to not push your graduation back? Find a school that has courses you need for graduation. Care about understanding what you are learning? Find a school that has more classes in your native tongue (I would assume English if you are understanding all of the linguistic jokes I's be makin', it's not like you are a linguist right. Right?) want to just have fun and party all the time? Go to UTK where they butt chug (shame you shouldn't bring that up. Plus that isn't study abroad) Regardless you need to research about the school. If the thought of researching for study abroad sounds like it is a lot of work, then don't, but when the place you picked causes you problems don't come crying to me. No really. I do not want to deal with a teary eyed you… oh the salty messiness. Ugh. But honestly, most schools give credits… is that right? Credits? Credit? I think it's usually 1. okay most schools give a credit for studying abroad anyway, so at least put a credit's (that sounds plural but it is not) worth of work in to preparing for it.

三番目

So now you have your passport to pass the ports and programed your program in your plans, and are about ready to hit this guy making corny jokes. Now what do you do? There are still like 10 months before this whole study abroad thing anyways. Well aside from the fact that many programs have really early sign-ups so you should already be applying to the one you want, you also are starting to notice that they want you to have this thing called money… and they want you to have a lot of it. Typically they want you to have enough to cover your living expenses for the whole year. Because everyone has that laying around. Except for that person earlier who has no family nor possessions, they have nothing. If you happen to be like them and have no money lying around then I'm sorry but you are screwed… I hope you really didn’t believe me. In all actuality there are several ways to get money for studying abroad. Many are very helpful and useful, but you can't rely on all of them to be in your bank account by the time your program requires it. If there is any way to start saving now you should do it. Now there are several ways to help with the money, but I'll talk about them in another post. Just know that even the projected amounts are just living expenses and you will almost undoubtable need more.

Number 4

For those now on a limited budget (good for you saving for this trip) you may want to start planning the things you will need to buy before you go. This is a scary step and often you find you did it wrong if you wait until the last second to do it. This one is also hard enough that I will actually make another post about "what to sneak in" but just know that you should try and get things that you need to order, sooner rather than later. Like that really nice camera lens so I could record myself talking about Japan. Only took 4 weeks to get to me. So glad I didn't wait until a week before leaving to try and get that one, otherwise I would be typing all of these posts…

#5

Ensure you have amenities to communicate with family, and try to have a cost effective way to do so. I would say the basic thing to do is make sure you have internet where you are going. If you are staying in dorms at the school you are studying abroad at then having internet is probably a given, but how do you contact your family. If you want to video call your family there are several free services you can use such as skype. Phone services are a little different. If you want to just bring your own phone from home to a different country then you may be a little surprised to find they have big up-charges for international calls. And not small up-charges either. For me I found the cheapest way for me to phone family was to use google voice, a free service, to make calls to my family. Before I left the country I set up a permanent phone number attached to my Gmail account which I can make calls from straight from Gmail. Then just for international calls I added $10 to my account so that I could make international calls. Turns out that it wasn't necessary. Calls to my family did not count as international because I set up a phone number that was local for them, the only calls that cost me anything were the ones to people in Japan. By the way, after a year in Japan I still have more than $7 left from that initial $10. there are many other ways to do things just like this so go out and research them. You may want to buy a watch that can have world time separate though so you don’t call home at 2:00 in the morning though.

Well this post has gotten a bit long. Want to see the rest of my top ten? Subscribe! also feel free to leave a comment down below. I would love to hear from you.