Category Stories: Gender
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Understanding Your Power: 7 Ways to Make Your Semester Overseas Less About You
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It’s cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true: travel opens your eyes to new experiences, new-to-you cultures, new ideas, and new ways of living and looking at the world. But having the ability to both choose and afford to live overseas for a period of time is a privilege, one that many people…
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Navigating My Identity as a White Woman Abroad
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Looking back on my expectations In the United States, one of the many privileges that I enjoy as a white female is the ability to blend in with the majority. When traveling, that’s not always the case. Because I have fair skin and blonde hair, in Argentina I have found that I’m often the object…
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Not Your Baby: 5 Tips for Facing Street Harassment Abroad
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You don’t need me to tell you that it’s hard out there for people who identify as female or femme. Everyday sexism is inescapable, and street harassment ranks among its ugliest expressions. Street harassment can vary depending on your location, or simply your luck.However, when studying abroad, it’s important to prepare oneself for a transition…
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A Feminist in Chile
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Where to go? Being a woman, much of life is different for me and studying abroad is not an exception. From contemplating where to go, to actually studying there, there are extra considerations. As a strong feminist who is extremely critical of the United States’ gender issues I was intimidated about what study abroad would…
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Mi Familia Chilena: How I Found Home After Being Uprooted Abroad
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About a month and a half into my semester abroad, I had to switch host families for reasons beyond my control. While this experience was disorienting and stressful, in the end it turned out about as well as it could have, and it revealed a lot to me about the support network that IFSA-Butler cultivates…
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Handling Illness While Abroad
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No matter how carefully students approach study abroad, illness and injury are often an unavoidable part of the experience. Visiting a doctor’s office in a foreign country can be both intimidating and stressful, however taking care of your physical health while abroad is extremely important, and experiencing a new healthcare system, while never ideal, can…
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How Does a First-Generation, Non-Traditional Student Study Abroad?
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My Story My parents did not attend college, and I was not really expected to attend either. My family also does not travel, and international travel was always a far-off fantasy for me. I never really expected for it to be possible for me to go anywhere; it was just something I daydreamed about from…
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Embracing Discomfort: Studying the Arts in London as an East Asian
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“There will never be a place where I can fully belong.”This is what I wrote down on Facebook, right before the plane took off to London, the city where I would stay for the next six months. All kinds of anxieties started to upsurge into my body, and one of them is the fear of…
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Being Black and Muslim in London
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Studying in a foreign environment, as exciting as it is, can be a little daunting. For students who identify as members of marginalized groups, transitioning can be even more difficult. As I was preparing to study abroad, I remember hearing that only 5% of Black students travelled abroad, and I found this statistic to be…
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Engaging in Uncomfortable Discussions about Race
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In London, I’ve experienced similar challenges with micro-aggressions (aka “casual racism”) as I have in the U.S. Like the United States, the UK has its own set of racial tensions that inhabit college campuses and the greater London community. In the conversations that I have had with other students of color, similar sentiments about the…
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