How Traveling Can Help Students in Their Career

At high school or college, you may have plenty of opportunities to travel, work or study abroad. Many schools and universities offer various student exchange programs, scholarships or special benefits for brilliant minds. And although traveling is a unique experience for any age, the earlier you learn the lessons it teaches the better. 

At a young age, you are discovering yourself, your desires, strengths and weaknesses. You are choosing the career path. Have the boldest dreams about your future. The experience, knowledge and skills you obtain traveling around the world can give you life-long personal benefits and become a valuable contribution in professional life.

As a student, you are yet unburdened with 8-hour working day, mortgage or family troubles. You have the luxury of flexibility to study anywhere in the world and use your relatively long studying breaks to try something new. It’s the perfect timing to make the most of it.

While many consider traveling as just a fun and pleasurable moment in their lives, it can give a lot of competitive benefits for a professional development. For instance:

You Will Be Pushed Out from Your Comfort Zone

As a young person, most likely you have a pretty set comfort zone. Parents who take care about all your basic needs and solve your problems. Friends you’ve been hanging out with since you started to walk. Repetitive activities and a well-known neighborhood. Familiar routes and the same all places for meeting with pals. We become comfortable with the roles we play in our daily lives and the idea of breaking them may be disturbing and scary.

The worst about this situation is that not only do we stop learning but start to degrade. In our daily routines we already have a firmly established protocol of communicating with people and facing daily challenges. New circumstances, on the other hand, help us to come up with new solutions and get the most of the situation. Finding yourself in a new place, around strangers who have different values and go about life differently, requires a new level of flexibility and adaptivity to fast changing conditions.

It may be frightening, but once your figure out how to communicate with different cultures and learn to navigate foreign environments, you’ll become a smarter and more competent individual. 

You Build More Confidence

As you surmount obstacles of finding your destination in a foreign country, asking for basic things at the store or earning an extra penny for your needs, you grow confidence and the ability to think out of the box. Especially when you travel alone, with no parents or friends around to have your back, you learn to rely and depend on yourself alone, trust your senses and ideas.

If we never leave comfortable conditions of our home, we can’t learn what we are truly capable of. Creative ways of interacting with foreigners and new patterns of behavior that you develop to ride out of the challenging situations help you improve your psychology skills and become more persuasive as a speaker.

You Will Immerse into Foreign Culture and Its Language

Traveling abroad gives a unique opportunity to learn a second language (or even several ones) in a natural way, without cramming grammar and vocabulary. Finding yourself in a foreign-speaking country, you will be inevitably exposed to local dialects and slang and forced to practice the language in different contexts on a daily basis. Every time booking a room at the hotel, ordering food at the restaurant or asking for directions, you will be grasping also a local non-verbal language that no textbook can teach.

You will become savvy with local culture. It’s always easier to be biased and label others for their annoying habits. Much more beneficial, however, it is to know the cultural values that may explain a certain behavior and use them to your own advantage. Being aware of cultural peculiarities and norms can help to get an idea of how to cope with different problems and conflicts on an international level or how to establish communication with a foreign business partner.

You Can Adapt to Being Mobile

The world is globalizing so rapidly, through internet and media, that the borders between countries have almost wiped out. Local companies grew into international corporations with the offices all over the globe, with multicultural partnerships and the client base in every corner of our planet.

Whether you like it or not, but you may end up applying for a job that requires a lot of business trips. No professional CV writing service will help you to present in a better light the skills you don’t possess. Language and cultural knowledge give a solid competitive advantage. Besides, with such boons under your belt, a stressful trip is nothing more than a delightful voyage.

You Will Build a Network of Useful Contacts

Having some time abroad is a great chance to make valuable connections. Whether you are studying in a local alma-mater, earning your bread or just having fun there, you will be meeting various people. With their own stories, unique characters and life views. Eager to share their personal experiences.

The majority of people really enjoy when someone tries to speak their native language or learn about their culture. They will gladly tell you about their customs and traditions. Reveal the best places to visit, unfold hidden non-touristic spots or show the most convenient routes. Plus, it is always nice to have a local pal in case you need a hand in something.

A million-dollar advice: expose yourself to as many people as you can. Have a chat in a bakery, make a conversation with an elderly woman in the park, speak to a delivery guy. When you have a lot of friends abroad, the world doesn’t seem that large and insecure place any more. Any journey is much more enjoyable when you share it with a good company. Besides, you never know when these new connections may prove useful.