In the United States there are 2 types to choose from:
- An exchange, where you pay a small program fee (a few hundred dollars) and your normal tuition. You pay rent and feed yourself on your budget, just like you would at home.
- A program like CIEE, IES, or USAC. Usually running anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a semester.
The choice is pretty clear, right? But people still choose those expensive programs! So they must be offering something amazing, right? Something that makes all that money worth it.
Those programs offer complete support. I have a group to meet you at the airport, they take care of the apartment hunting for you (read you have no choice where or who you live with), they take care of your meals. It’s a smaller group of foreign students together so you get more one on one attention, and they plan outings for you to other cities.
That might appeal to you, but it doesn’t appeal to me. The point of studying abroad is to learn, grow, and become more independent. With those programs, you pay more to lose the freedom of choice. On an exchange you get to do everything yourself, and it gives you so much freedom, and that freedom helps you to build lifelong skills.
On travel: You make fast friends with a huge group of foreign kids who all have the same interests to go to museums, travel, and see history. It’s easy to find a group of people and learn to book your own tickets when and where you want to go.
On housing: You get to find your own apartment, you set your own budget and choose where and who you want to live with! Most of the times you’ll be saving money renting in a foreign country than you would paying for on campus housing at any American university anyways!
On food: You get to grocery shop like a local, and find your own favorite restaurants rather than eating at the dining hall because you already paid for it.
I truly think if I had done a program in Italy rather than an exchange, I never would have built the confidence to go on and live in China and Russia.
The only major benefit I DO see from programs like those is they tend to cater more to other majors besides business and economics, majors like English, drama, or history. I ended up taking masters level design courses, mixed with Italian, Italian history, and Italian markets, and I loved all of them, even as an English Major. I loved getting to choose my own classes out of everything the university offered, just like I would have at my home university. I think when you study abroad, you should be learning about the country you’re in too! So if you do want to try to do an exchange, the only thing I would recommend is saving as many of your electives as you can for it!
And there is one other crazy option too. I know a guy who didn’t find any programs he liked, so he switched to all online classes at his university, found an apartment to share with a bunch of exchange students and just moved to Spain for the semester. I think you miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that way, but you do have more time to travel than anyone else because you aren’t stuck in physical classes! College really is the age to live abroad. Once life gets started and you have commitments and responsibilities, it gets so much harder to leave.
Finding Eden 