As the semester winds down, I’ve been reflecting on where I was at this time last year. It was the first term of my junior year, and I was preparing to spend the second abroad at another university across an ocean and several time zones. I was terrified, constantly questioning whether I had made the right choice to go abroad. 

You see, I did not come to university expecting to study abroad. In fact, I studied abroad for exactly the reason people with straight heads on their shoulders tell you not to; but I’m endowed with what can only be described as the most crooked of heads on my narrow shoulders. So, I went abroad because all my friends were doing it, and I didn’t want to feel socially isolated in the spring. What I did not know then — and what I would only come to realize after the fact — was that going abroad was the most liberating, testing and all-around enthralling experience I could have had at 20 years old. 

I chose to go abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Unlike the many other host institutions that students go abroad to, the University of Edinburgh was, in fact, a serious intellectual environment that forced me to put on my thinking cap every now and again. There was “study” involved in my “study abroad” experience, but I will admit that most of the “studying” I did took place outside conventional structures — not at libraries, classrooms or my god-awful dorm room, which really felt more like a ward of an insane asylum than a place that I should have been calling home for four months. 

I did my “studying” at my local pub, surrounded by a handful of middle-to-late aged Scottish men who seemingly had nothing better to do every night than drink their weight — which was not negligible, I might add — in beer. I did some solo studying at a dimly lit jazz club in Vienna. Some more in a busy Frankfurt train station, and some more on the beaches of the Grecian island of Naxos. Oh, and among my fondest sessions involved the tiniest bathroom of a local pizzeria in Italy, which comforted me a great deal as I heaved up a noxious combination of Limoncello, pasta con pancetta, cigarette ash and half the bottle of 4-euro wine I drank before dinner.

As you’ve likely surmised by now, I was not merely studying my ordinary curriculum abroad. No, whilst abroad, I sought a survey in cultural studies with a concentration in personal development. Of course, I was still reading Hegel and Arendt; after all, you can take a woman out of the Philosophy Department, but you cannot take the Department’s teachings out of the woman. Classrooms are corporeal, but lessons are eternal. Much the same could be said about experiences abroad: the experiences are momentary, but their impact is everlasting. 

I was the freest I’ve ever been abroad, and that freedom gave me the kind of room I needed to really grow out of and into myself. Being abroad provided me with the ideal environment to ditch old behaviors and adopt new ones (not all of which I’d nonchalantly preach to the public — I’ll posit this forthrightly now). I was cushioned by certain structures and institutions — think of them as safety nets — such as my home and host institutions, my family, professors from home that checked in on me from time to time and social havens that ensured all my falls would be caught before they became lethal. Consequently, I had the freedom to really try things. I did a lot of things abroad that I couldn’t have imagined doing the semester before I left. Big and small.

Take being stranded in Germany after missing a train because, as it turns out, Frankfurt does a poor job of distinguishing between the south and main terminals from which trains depart. Prior to my going abroad, any teeny-tiny wrench thrown in my travel plans would have sparked the most egregious spell of terror known to man in my psyche. After having been essentially deserted in Frankfurt and still somehow making it to Berlin with all my travel documents and most of my sanity, I can say that I don’t really have “travel anxiety” anymore. I also have neither trouble nor guilt leaving a bloke’s flat at two in the morning to walk back to my hostel in a foreign city. And I find it fun — and not all embarrassing — to sit alone with an afternoon espresso, chair facing the street so that I can watch the commotion on the pavements before me. 

I say this all now, having spent most of this semester comparing it to my last, thinking just how good I had it then, whilst seemingly being unaware of the degree of goodness in question. I was grateful abroad, don’t get me wrong. I was very well aware that it is rare to find oneself in a situation wherein one pays 26 pounds (around 30 U.S. dollars) to fly to Austria to prance around museums and eat schnitzel for four uninterrupted days. I wholly recognized how lucky I was to experience all of the things I did abroad. What I didn’t recognize then was just how free to experience those things I was.

For four months, I was unequivocally supported to be, to see, to experience to my heart’s content. I had the real freedom to choose what it was that I wanted to do at most moments, and no one and nothing even tried to stop me. And like nearly everyone else who goes abroad under similar circumstances, I was ignorant of the lack of constraints involved in my experience abroad. And maybe that’s exactly why I felt so free: the very idea of constraints seemed so irrelevant to me at the time. Why even spend mental energy reflecting on such things? Constraints are theoretical, and the complete collection of Egon Schiele’s paintings was actual and literally in front of me. So, as you would guess, I chose to delegate my mental energy to Schiele’s oeuvre. Stunning by the way, a ten out of ten, except for the very inconvenient fact that Schiele was a complete freak. But normal people don’t make great art. C’est la vie, mon chéri. 

I write this now not to persuade anyone to go abroad. I don’t think it’s the best choice for everyone. But for me, and for those who wish to expand their horizons, as Nietzsche philosophized, “with a sledgehammer,” I think it’s worthwhile. More importantly, I think that putting yourself in a position where you are unconstrained but still supported by structures that will catch you should you fall — whether it be in a foreign country or in your hometown — that is where real growth takes place.

Ignorance is usually — and rightly — frowned upon, especially in an institution like Brandeis whose task it is to uncover truth and dispel knowledge. But I think that, perhaps counterintuitively, when you are most ignorant of your luck you experience the greatest potential for growth. Because when the idea of constraint doesn’t even enter your mind, it doesn’t affect your decision making. You just act — whether that action constitutes merely being, seeing, existing, tasting, smelling, etc. You experience, and that experience can be of the greatest significance, if you make it so.