Studying abroad provides students with many benefits. Besides enhancing your language skills, increasing your world awareness, and growing personally, you also immerse yourself in a new culture and learn from a new perspective. It’s an experience that helps the student to reflect on his or her own life and changes it in the process. Taking yourself out of your comfort zone and throwing yourself  into another culture gives you no choice but to examine your own life and how you live it.

Studying abroad is one of the most ambitious challenges a teenager can undertake. It’s not easy to live in a country with a different language, far from your family where you have to learn new rules and customs.

The student who decides to accept this challenge returns to his or her country, most of the time friendlier, more inclusive and empathetic, willing to travel, and to extend his or her knowledge. But above all he or she learns to enhance diversity and to catch differences in a world that is ever-changing and always more globalized.

Besides all of the above,there are lot of benefits that this experience has on a work career. A 2016 study decided to investigate the long-term impact of individual international mobility programs, interviewing 900 participants that left their country between 1997 and 2012, to understand the impact on their professional and private lives. Researchers found that in most cases, those who left became happier than their contemporaries.

People shouldn’t be afraid of learning a new culture and discovering another country in all its beauty. Don’t be afraid to try new things and have an open mind. Say yes to adventure and study abroad; you will receive a chance to gain independence, confidence, friends, and to experience things that are unavailable to you in your home country.

-Letizia Cazzaniga is currently attending AMHS from Milan, Italy!