Be Open and Be Yourself

Author: 
Dominque Swift, AIFS: Rome Summer 2022 Session, Study + Internship

The best advice I could give others who want to study abroad is to be open and understand the power of yes and no. When planning to travel outside the country and step out of your comfort zone intentionally, it is imperative to be aware and accountable for your preconceived biases and boundaries.

Before embarking on my summer adventure to Europe, I wrote out some learning objectives that I wanted to have achieved by the end of my trip.
(I wrote these goals on January 20, 2022)

  1. “I hope to facilitate a paradigm shift from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism to gain academic and professional skills that can be applied in regional and global contexts. I want to learn how to communicate better with diverse groups of people respectfully and effectively. Studying abroad will aid me in developing a trans-cultural perspective to improve my problem-solving abilities.”
  2. “I want to develop cultural awareness further. After this program, I hope to demonstrate knowledge of my cultural prejudices and beliefs and how they affect my ability to work with others so that I can become a better person.”

One of my biggest fears about living abroad was going alone and being thrown into a living environment with people I didn’t know and who didn’t understand me or I them. I felt anxious about being one of only two Black people in my program, and I feared it would hinder my ability to enjoy myself freely. However, I can now say with tremendous gratitude and humbleness that I had the time of my life once I just focused on being myself instead of worrying about how others would perceive me and releasing the assumptions that I could only be comforted by people that look like me. I had three other roommates, which put four of us in an apartment, and we all live in different states and have very different backgrounds. Nonetheless, they turned out to be people I never knew I needed to meet. They helped to expose me to so many different experiences and pushed me not to be afraid of the unknown so that I could truly savor the present.
One of my favorite things about being abroad was meeting new people at every turn. It was an honor to hear their stories, laugh at their jokes, dance with them, and fellowship over food. Traveling helped me reignite a love for life outside the often fictitious one on our phones and social media.

 

Term: