Fair Aims To Help Students Readjust

As the University continues to encourage undergraduates to study abroad, Harvard hosted a Boston-area conference this weekend to help students returning from overseas readjust to American college life.

While many students at Harvard and throughout the Boston area say studying abroad can be a rewarding experience in college, their return home and the process of reintegrating themselves can be challenging.

Harvard’s Office of International Programs (OIP) held the fourth annual “Boston Area Study Abroad Reentry Conference,” which is hosted each year by a different local university. The conference, held at various locations on campus, drew about 220 students and attempted to help students alleviate these problems and ultimately move past them.

One of the larger problems facing students is “confronting the way that you’ve changed,” according to OIP Assistant Director Giorgio DiMauro, who co-chaired the conference.

“The kinds of changes are not always the obvious ones,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just a difference in perspective,” an element that makes the reintegration process harder.

Kristin Beattie, a senior at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, who spent a year abroad in Mexico, said her priorities were different when she returned.

“I had seen bigger issues around the world,” she said.

Jim Citron, a faculty member at Dartmouth College who serves as the dean of international programs for study abroad facilitator Lexia International, said that students frequently “will come back and realize that all their relationships need to be renegotiated.”

The issue is further compounded by the fact that reintegration tends to be an individual process.

“Quickly, I found that people didn’t really want to hear my stories,” said Ashley Michalek, a senior at the College of the Holy Cross.

The morning session of the conference focused on the issue of reintegration. The keynote addresses and the hour-long “small group re-entry exercises” allowed students to talk about their experiences and aimed at “bringing people together who had experienced that at the same time,” DiMauro said.

DiMauro added that the conference was a unique way to help people talk about their experiences because it served as “a way to get a critical mass of people together,” something that is hard for students to do alone.

The afternoon session featured panels on further international study and careers in international business and education, as well as an International Opportunities Fair. This session was largely devoted to both “putting the experiences into action,” according to Citron, and “teaching students how to get back abroad,” according to DiMauro.

Another common issue that other students faced was the language change.

“You almost feel that while living in that [foreign] culture, you become a part of the language,” said Mark Newton, another senior at Holy Cross.

But some students struggled less with the adjustment—Niall T. Prendergast ’09, who spent a year in Germany, said he had no difficulty coming home.

“I just started speaking English again immediately,” he said.

Others said they simply had no time to adjust. Michalek went straight from her time abroad to a summer job at a law firm, and then back to college.

“I didn’t really have the time to react,” she said.

And St. Michael’s College’s senior Kara Burrage said she needed “alone time to reflect.”

“I pretty much secluded myself,” she said. “I didn’t want to drive for two weeks until I was adjusted.”