If you study languages at university, you will get the opportunity to do a Year Abroad, which means you can either study or work in another country for a year (or do both!). Since I studied French & Spanish, I was lucky enough to spend one semester studying in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, and the other studying in Barcelona in Spain. As my year abroad has now drawn to a close (quite a few years ago now!), I thought I would reflect on some things that I might have done differently or things that I wish I had done more throughout the year.
1. Don’t go home all the time – It may seem tempting to just nip home for a weekend, especially when flights between London and Europe can be so cheap, and I will admit that I did go home a fair few times during the time that I was away. However, after having finished the year I do wish that I had spent as much time as I possibly could abroad, because I ended up missing out on loads of things! At the time I thought I wanted to go home, but this sort of backfired on me because I just got major fomo from missing out on the stuff my friends were doing back at uni when I was sat at home.
2. Travel around the country you’re in – Definitely one of the best parts of getting to do a year abroad! I took the time to explore lots of different places I’d never been to before, including Nice, Monaco, Antibes, Cannes, Murcia, Ibiza, Tenerife and more! It’s also really fun to leave the place you’re studying/working in for a few days and take a trip to somewhere different; so that you can break up your time there a little bit. Domestic flights and train travel can be fairly pricey, so I would definitely suggest looking at bus companies such as FlixBus to get better and cheaper deals.
3. Try to make friends with natives – This is the one thing that I wish I had tried to do a lot more during the year! I think that the only real way to fully integrate yourself and to learn a language fluently is to make an effort to mingle with native speakers and talk to them in their language, rather than just in English. It is actually very hard because most people speak English and want to practice that themselves, but you do have to push past that and not be embarrassed to make mistakes or say something that’s not quite right – they will still know what you mean!
4. Take lots of pictures – Buy that new camera you’ve always wanted. Document all the amazing moments you will have of your friends and the beautiful landscapes. Sometimes, I just like to scroll through my Instagram or through the photos in my camera roll and I am reminded of all the good times I had! This way, I will never forget everything that I saw and did because it is right there on my phone. All in all, you will definitely not regret taking as many pictures as possible!
5. Do your research – Last, but not least, it is very important to consider what you need to do before you actually embark on your year abroad. Number 1 is where you are going to live. You want to make sure you will be living in a nice area and one that is not too far from your university/place of work. I made this mistake when looking for flats in Spain, as I thought where we were living was a 10-minute walk from our campus, but it turns out that we were at a different campus! I would say that number 2 is checking out the specific requirements of the country you are heading to; for example, you may need to sort out a VISA (your host university/place of work should help you out with this). For most countries in Europe you probably won’t need to worry about anything major like documentation, phone contracts and dangerous diseases, since I just used my normal phone contract for the whole year and did not have to have any injections. However, do make sure your passport will be valid for the year and that all your travel insurance is sorted.
À bientôt ! ¡Hasta luego!
Abbie :)
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