Effects Of Study Abroad

Re-entry is the process of returning home to the native country after spending time abroad. This process elicits a mix of emotions from every student following their study abroad experience. Many students feel relief at having completed the journey, depression and/or anxiety that it is over, and nostalgia over the amazing things that they have experienced. Study abroad has a range of positive effects on students’ personalities, emotional states, and future plans. However, the re-emergence process can also be the root of depression and anxiety. This paper will analyze the common psychological and emotional effects that both the study abroad experience and the re-entry period have on students. It is important to note that many of these effects

If during this process, students start to question their native cultural practices, they will feel certain disillusionment with their native culture upon their return home. They may feel longing to return to their host culture and therefore might shut themselves out of their native cultural practices, creating a spiral of emotional discomfort. On the other hand, if the study abroad experience causes students to reaffirm their cultural ethnocentrism, their return home might be marked with disappointment because their host culture is not everything they remembered it to be, they had placed it on a pedestal in their minds, or things have changed back

Rhinesmith’s Ten Stages of Adjustment summarize the effects of culture shock and reverse culture shock. They describe the natural peaks and valleys that students encounter during their time abroad. Each student experiences these periods at different intensities and for different lengths of time. The wave-like design displays the arrival confusion, honeymoon stage, adjustment period, and adapting and assimilating periods which occur during study abroad. These ups and downs are all a part of the “study abroad experience” that students learn so much about. However the roller coaster also includes a representation of the re-entry period, which is less widely talked about among students before they return home. Re-entry includes initial excitement followed by a judgmental period, realization stage, reverse culture shock, and balanced “readaptation”. The transition back home is marked by an initial period of excitement where students think that they will be returning to a familiar atmosphere. The realization stage is where this bubble around the perfect image of home is popped and students realize that things have changed back home and that people have gone on with their every day lives and do not care about the Eventually, students reach a stage of balance between the new and the old and the foreign and familiar perspectives that