Studying Abroad - Two American Students Discuss Their Experiences

From 1991-92 through 2004-05, the number of students studying abroad has more than doubled according to Open Doors 2004. Representing an increase of roughly 145%, the raw numbers translate to about 71,000 students in 1991-92 to almost 175,000 in 2004-05.

Many in recent years have steered away from studying in Europe due to the falling dollar. Though most still list places like Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona and Amsterdam as their number one choices, sticker shock has many students turning towards other areas of the world.

However, at least two young ladies have followed their dreams of studying abroad in Europe. Emily and Rachel are both graduate students at the University of Amsterdam where they are in the ‘Brain and Cognitive Sciences’ master’s program run by the Cognitive Science Center, Amsterdam (CSCA).

Each has also made the most rare of commitments - neither is doing a simple semester or year abroad. Each has made the commitment to complete an entire degree program in a foreign land.

Emily grew up in Los Angeles and earned her bachelor’s degree at Harvard. A math major, Emily also has a great interest in music. She plays the violin and had the opportunity to be involved with classical orchestras throughout high school and college. While majoring in math, Emily also completed a minor called ‘Language, Mind and Brain’. Her undergraduate thesis was related to the concept of mathematical linguistics, a process by which mathematical models are constructed to describe the structure of language.

Rachel is from rural Maine and is a graduate of the University of Maine Honors College. Her college major was French, but she studied German and decided to learn Spanish online at Language Exchange, knowing full well that teachers who can teach more than one language are in demand. Rachel says her main non-academic interest is dance, having performed in and choreographed a number of productions throughout her school years. Her senior thesis was titled ‘Savoir par coeur n’est pas savoir,’ or ‘To know by heart is not to know at all.’ This project focused on the link between grammatical awareness in one’s native language with second language acquisition during or following adolescence. As one aspect of that thesis, Rachel noted the negative impact that whole language philosophy in elementary school can have on teens’ foreign language learning.

Rachel’s and Emily’s masters program at UvA involves the cognitive processes underlying language use. A few classes they’ve taken this year are: PsychoNeuroLinguistics, Cognitive Models of Language, and Cognition & Communication. Electives Emily has taken include Probabilistic Grammars, Logic and Cognition, and Formal Approaches to Grammar while Rachel has also included Second Language Acquisition, Psychophysiological Experimentation, and NeuroImaging in her studies.

While spending time in the Netherlands, site editor Tom Hanson had a chance to talk with these two young ladies about their program and their experiences studying abroad.

Can you give a brief explanation as to why you chose to come to the Netherlands for graduate school? In particular, why you chose to study abroad, why Amsterdam, and what was the basis for your selection of a program of studies?
Emily: My primary motivation was that I thought it would be interesting to live in a new country, and studying abroad provided a good opportunity to do so. I didn’t have any very specific expectations; I was just feeling adventurous. I started looking for programs with a few constraints in mind: I wanted to study linguistics or cognitive science from a mathematical perspective, and although I didn’t want to be in the US, I needed a program that was taught in English. Those constraints narrowed the field pretty quickly, and the question of where I could get funding further narrowed it. Essentially, I was then left with Amsterdam.

Rachel: My choice to come here is more of a personal one than that the university here offered me something that I couldn’t find elsewhere. My fiancé is Dutch, so coming here was first and foremost about the two of us being together. Since I hadn’t yet finished the MA French program I had begun in the U.S., I checked out the UvA’s MA French program with the intention of finishing my Masters in French. When I got the catalog for the Faculty of Humanities, I discovered they also had a Masters program in Linguistics which seemed much larger and more dynamic than the French program. The idea of studying language acquisition at the university inspired me and while studying in the linguistics department I heard about the language track of the Brain & Cognitive Sciences program. The idea appealed to me immensely because in linguistics I look to some general cognitive principles such as memory, learning and plasticity in order to better understand child vs. adult language acquisition. I applied to the CogSci program as well, and the two programs overlap quite nicely.

In what areas has your experience and choice of program met or exceeded your expectations? Have there been any areas where the experience and the program have fallen short of what you had hoped for?

Rachel: The researchers working here as professors are brilliant researchers. They really know their fields and they are exceptionally specialized and well-published. The chance to study in a place with so many talented researchers is something I hadn’t counted on; of course, part of this is my background: French is more about teaching than research, so I was lucky enough to have a stream of enthusiastic French teachers as undergraduate professors. In contrast, I find that a lot of professors here do not translate their enthusiasm for their research into an enthusiastic discussion of the topic in their classrooms. Most learning occurs outside the classroom here, which makes going to class less stimulating and less fulfilling.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the wide variety of students with whom I study. Since the Masters programs here are taught in English, I study with just as many foreign students as with Dutch ones; our program has students from various countries around Europe and a few other North Americans.

I also enjoy the interdisciplinary nature of studying here. My classmates come from fields as varied as Classical Languages, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Neurobiology and Neuroscience undergraduate degrees. It is not only fascinating, but also helpful to have so many backgrounds around you. In my junior and senior year of undergrad I was always with the same group of about 15 French majors and Masters’ students; you had to be completely fluent in French to take those courses. Now, neurobiologists and linguists are studying linguistic theories together one day and studying connectionist models together the next. This freedom to cross academic borders is very refreshing.

Emily: The international experience has definitely been worthwhile. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, many from the Netherlands, but also many from around the world. Learning Dutch has been a highlight of my time here. I always enjoy learning languages, but learning a language in the country where it’s spoken is far more exciting than learning it at home.

The flip side is that while I’ve met a lot of people, I haven’t made many close friends. Although my Dutch is improving rapidly, not speaking any Dutch when I arrived made it hard to get involved in activities outside of school. And while there is a large international student community at the university, it mostly consists of undergraduates who are here for just a semester or a year and are primarily interested in drinking and partying. For those with different priorities, meeting people can be hard.

With regards to my program, my academic background has ironically prepared me too well. Of the many classes we take in the first year, I was most looking forward to the ones that combine mathematics with linguistics and cognitive science. Unfortunately, these have ended up primarily covering topics that I was already familiar with, so the classes I was most looking forward to have ended up being some of the least novel.

Can you compare instructional methods utilized in your graduate program with those you experienced in America as an undergraduate? How has the quality of instruction compared?

Emily: The instructional methods here have been much more uniform than those I experienced in America. As an undergraduate, I had a wide variety of course-types, ranging from large lectures to small discussion seminars to hands-on lab work. Here, almost all my courses have the same format: they have about a dozen students and we meet for 2 or 3 hours. In the first half of the class, the teacher presents a lecture using PowerPoint. In the second half, a student presents a paper on a related topic. Of course, as an undergraduate, I took courses on a much wider range of topics (not just mathematics and linguistics, but also general education requirements and random electives), whereas now my courses cover a much narrower set of topics and primarily include the same group of students, which I expect contributes a lot to the uniformity of teaching. The result is that my overall feeling about the quality of instruction here is quite neutral: few classes stand out as either particularly good or particularly bad.

Rachel: As someone who’s studied education and aims to be a teacher myself, this is an interesting question for me. I can sum it up simply by saying that (in my experience) in the US the professors do a lot of teaching which stimulates learning, and here learning is primarily done outside the classroom. Most of my experiences in the classroom here involve presentation only; communication is one-directional from teacher to student and the means of presentation are 100% identical, being PowerPoint presentations ad nauseum. The administrative necessities for ensuring teaching effectiveness are in place (end-of-semester evaluations, student representation on the administrative board, etc.); however, the philosophical backbone of teaching and learning is missing. Also, graduate students here don’t teach, so beginning professors or post docs have, in most cases, never taught a class before. This lack of teaching experience is all too obvious, and compounded with frequent lack of caring about teaching outcomes, the result is (in my opinion) often disastrous.

What is an advantage when it comes to working with top researchers becomes a disadvantage in the classroom. Most of the professors are invested in their research careers to a much higher extent than they are interested in their teaching careers; in fact, I’d even venture a guess that they don’t consider themselves as HAVING a ‘teaching career’.

What is the educational highlight from a learning standpoint for you thus far - is there one remarkable aspect of your program that has really stood out in your first year in the program?

Rachel: What stands out for me is being ‘back to science’ since my last experience with science was in high school. It’s been fun for me to go about thinking about things with as rational of a mind as possible. Most of my prior studies involved doing things like finding metaphors and political references in literature and comparing the rhythm of French poetry to English poetry. I LOVED all of these pursuits, but it’s exciting to be in an environment where there are so many rational minds around me. I’m learning just as much about scientific philosophy as I’m learning actual information about language and how language might be in the brain. Before this year, I was approaching the question of language acquisition from a humanities standpoint; now I have trained my mind a bit to evaluate theories more rationally and how to present arguments in a way that will satisfy scientists. I still have all my opinions and artistic visions, but I am not currently using them in my academics. In five years studying French, my creativity blossomed; now I am enjoying my rational mind blossoming and keeping poetry for the weekend.

Emily: The educational highlight for me has been coming to understand what “cognitive science” really is. Although this sounds like something you would expect me to know before starting such a program, I see in retrospect that I really didn’t understand what holds the field together. As an undergraduate, I had been exposed to a smattering of specific topics from “cognitive science”, but I saw it as more of a catch-all term for interdisciplinary questions. Over the last year I have come to understand that cognitive science is more than just a collection of topics imported from other disciplines: it has its own defining goals and central questions.

Can you give a summary of your living experience and the importance of that experience for you as part of studying abroad?

Emily: My dorm experience has been mixed. I was very fortunate to get a great dorm right in the city center. I have a decently large bedroom with a small kitchen unit on one wall, and I share a bathroom with one other girl. The building is full of international students, which has been a nice opportunity to meet people, although not quite as good an opportunity as I had hoped: because there isn’t much shared space, there aren’t so many opportunities to interact with my neighbors. Many other dorms are opposite: they have kitchens and bathrooms shared by an entire floor. While these dorms are more social, the kitchens and bathrooms are always dirty, so it’s a trade-off. But it’s not a trade-off you have any control over: the housing company simply assigns you to one dorm or another.

Rachel: I know I have missed out on many social opportunities by not being in the dorm, but I don’t regret at all not living in the dorms. While it would be nice to have dorm-mates, there are many more things that I always hated about living in dorms than I would gain socially from living there. I’m at the university enough to have lots of social interactions with other students during the week, and Emily and I spend every Sunday at the public library because the university is closed. Different personality types respond differently to dorm life; if you like dorm life in America, you might also like it abroad (although I hear it’s different here).

What advice would you give students thinking about studying abroad in the future?

Emily: My main advice to someone who’s considering studying abroad is to really think about what you want to do while you’re abroad. Living in a foreign country is exciting, but you’re not simply going to be living: you’ll also be studying, and that’s going to take up a significant amount of your time. So in addition to thinking about general living questions like what country or city you want to be in, also pay close attention to the study program you’d be doing there. For many people, studying abroad is also an opportunity to study a new subject. That’s a great idea, but it’s important not to let the fact that a subject is new and different stop you from carefully considering whether it’s something you want to spend a semester, a year, or more, focusing on.

My final piece of advice to someone studying abroad would be to stay in touch with your friends and family at home. When life abroad is feeling difficult–as it invariably will at some point–it’s very reassuring to know that your old support networks are still in place. Between the telephone, email, and Skype, studying abroad doesn’t have to mean cutting yourself off from your old life. Even amidst the excitement of exploring a new place, I think it’s well worth taking the time to retain those important connections with home.

What advice would you give students preparing to study abroad in the coming year?

Rachel:
1. Perhaps this should go without saying, but stay on top of the visa/immigration paperwork. If you’re lucky, your host university will help you out with this, but many universities do not, and missing the first few weeks of the semester because you didn’t have the right visa is not a good way to start the year.
2. Don’t rely on your grades ‘not transferring’. While it’s true that most exchanges do not use your foreign grades in your GPA back home, your transcript from abroad should be included whenever you send your US transcript somewhere. You don’t have to stress about your grades, but they shouldn’t be inordinately low either.
3. Plan ahead. With the dollar’s current value, most exchanges involve living much more expensively than back home. One way to absorb some of this cost is to buy your textbooks in the US and take them with you, as well as taking clothes for winter even if it’s not winter when you leave. Know the climate (for example, coming to Amsterdam you need an umbrella and a really good raincoat!)
4. Learn ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’ at the very least and consider signing up for a language course while you’re abroad. Language courses are not only a way to learn the local language and culture, they also offer numerous social connections with others adjusting to life in your host country. Learning the language connects you to the country and will keep you connected long after you’ve moved back Stateside.
5. Have lots of FUN!!