Language Degrees With A Year Abroad: All You Need To Know
When you study a science, you expect some experience in a lab, doing science. When you study, say, martial arts, you’re not going to be spending all of your time pouring over books and trying to pay attention in lectures (and before you ask, yes, martial arts does exist as a degree programme. We looked it up). And when you study a language degree, you’re going to want to be spending some time speaking it.
That’s what a year abroad is for in language courses; to stop you from not paying attention in lectures and seminars and to actually get you using the language properly. For this, a year abroad is invaluable and an enormously important part of your degree – it’s very, very, very important to graduate from a language degree being fluent in the lingo; otherwise, what’s the point?
The Obvious Advantages
Well, first off, as discussed above, you’ll leave whatever country you visited fluent in the language spoken there. That’s more or less a given. And if you don’t, you really should have spent more time outside your room. Language students spend one or two years learning just enough of the lingo to get by in another country well enough to survive, and are then scattered like leaves all over the place and left to fend for themselves in the big, wide, foreign world. It’s an adventure, and should be an awful lot of fun. But the main bonus is, and we can’t stress this enough, leaving the country at the end of the year being able to speak French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Samoan…
A year abroad as part of a language course has become so much of an expected thing that most language students who don’t spend time abroad tend to be doing either very specialist courses (nobody has worked out how the Latin students are going to find an exchange partner) or have messed up the paperwork in a big way. Employers will look for experience abroad as part and parcel of the degree programme, and it’s immensely important that a graduate is capable of proving that they speak the language well enough to be fluent – that’s what the year abroad is for.
The Less Obvious Advantages
Basically, expect some adventure on your year abroad – spending an entire year in a foreign country is a great opportunity to broaden your horizons and have some fun. After all, “abroad” is always exciting, and living there doesn’t make it any less so. Take the chance to go travelling, gather some stories about yourself and all of that kind of thing; though we suggest you take care and don’t come back saying things like “I just really found myself on that beach, man, it was so spiritual”. The best possible thing that can happen with a sentence like that is everybody ignores it. Don’t be that guy. Please?
So yeah, if you don’t come back from, say, Russia feeling oh-so-very spiritual; employers will very much admire you for surviving in what they see as a terrifying and hostile place for a year. It’s the way the world works – if you can do something that somebody else can’t, even if it is just asking if they have any bacon left behind the counter, they’ll instantly be impressed with you. Other languages are one of the hardest things to learn, one of the easiest to perfect, and one of the most impressive subjects to utilise. Remember that.
Jobs
If you’re intending to take a year away from university or to continue your studies whilst you’re abroad, we have some advice for you – get a job! This has an enormous amount of advantages, and, just like this article, there’s more advantages than first meets the eye.
For one thing, a job will earn you a decent amount of money, and everybody except those crazy people on Youtube likes money (and even then we’re suspicious of those people). The extra cash, if cleverly saved, could help enormously in your final year when you’re trying to study and need a bit of a cushion to fall back on when you don’t have time to cook, and want to enjoy a grubby takeaway instead. Alternatively, go ahead and spend the money looking around the country you’re going to be spending your time in – go to clubs, bars and everywhere else and flash some cash if you feel like it; why not?
Money’s not the only advantage to a job abroad, though (half the people reading this article may have just laughed, but it’s true). A job will increase the amount of time you’ll be spending around people enormously, which generally a lot of people would consider a bad thing. But remember, you’re here to speak the language, and the more time you spend communicating with locals, the better. You’ll thank yourself later in the year when you know what that woman means when she asks for something random in her native language.
Finally, a job signals to employers – who, remember, won’t be able to speak the language – that you were pro-active during your time abroad and did more than just hide away in your room. This is, obviously, a big bonus, and should be remembered as one before you translate that CV of yours.
As far as actually getting a job goes, we have a little bit of advice – make sure to sell yourself properly as a student studying the language, as opposed to a local. You won’t be able to impress the locals much at the start of the year with your skills in their language, but they may well be a little more interested in your command of English – try to focus on areas that have a fair few English customers; that should help your chances.
Second little bit of advice – try to get a job in a manual skill, like bar tending or cooking or even cleaning plates if it comes to it – everybody knows you’ll be gone in a year, so you’re probably not going to get anything that makes an enormous amount of money or is particularly permanent. Once you accept that, it’ll be a lot easier to get a decent job.
Friends
This is an important one. Making friends all over again after the highs and lows of first year is probably going to seem like a bit of a drag (sometimes it’s just painful talking to people, particularly if it’s not in your native language) but it has to be done at some point or another, and friends abroad come with their own very distinct advantages, like, for example, accommodation abroad. We know this seems a little calculating so don’t worry, we’ve done the bad bit by saying it for you. Knowing people who live abroad and staying in contact with them is enormously helpful in later life when you’re hoping to stay in, say, Berlin for a weekend but can’t find a hotel that isn’t full that night. Friends abroad are good, useful things to have.
Besides, having friends, abroad or not, is a very important thing. We – that is, human beings – are immensely social animals, and we’re not built to spend a year in solitary confinement watching the world go past speaking a different language. Most of us need company, and it’s very important to make some good relationships early on in your time abroad, so you’ll have someone to talk to when you need them.
Generally the system for language students means that you’ll be spending time in a house, flat or halls filled with other students either in a similar situation or just studying at a local university. Make friends with these people first – for one thing, they’re the closest, and for another, they’re probably your best bet straight off the bat; they already have more in common with you than most and you haven’t even met them yet. Focus on that first, branch out later.
Some Scary Stuff
There is one tiny little very minor downside to studying abroad that should really be noted before your university whisks you up and pops you down in the middle of nowhere with no real idea of what’s going on. Thing is, your year abroad might – might – have a negative impact on your final year. This isn’t academically speaking, of course – a year abroad should help your degree along enormously. It’s more about your choices as far as accommodation is concerned, as well as working out who to live with when you return.
Thing is, it will have been a year; people will have moved on, got new houses, graduated, and left university due to mental breakdowns. What you come back to may well end up looking a little chaotic. Which is fine, but it’s something that you should very much be aware of – try to organise your accommodation as early as you possibly can, even if it is through Skype, or you’ll end up being back in – horror of horrors – halls with all the first years who still can’t work out how to cook pasta. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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