Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Northwest Study Abroad Returnee Conference 2010

Korrin B.

January 23, 2010 - 8:01 PM

Last year, around this time, I was incredibly homesick for Greece. I had been back in the United States after my study abroad experience for about five months. I tried to connect to the sense of travel in any way that I could. One option that was presented to me was the first ever Northwest Study Abroad Returnee Conference. I loved it so much that I actually wrote a blog about it last year. I loved it so much that I decided to go back again this year as a volunteer. For those of you who are not familiar with the Northwest Study Abroad Returnee Conference, it is a recently established event that brings recent returnees together in Portland to share about their experiences, learn about ways to fund further travels, and increase their knowledge about the international job market.

This year, as a volunteer, I was asked to speak about my experience of returning home after studying abroad in Greece. The opening speaker would be sharing her experience, but they also wanted to have a current student's perspective. So, I along with three other returnees, shared the very unique feeling of coming home after living abroad. As speakers, we represented all different geographic regions, which was pretty cool. I represented Europe, while the others had been in Africa, South America, and Australia.

Being asked to talk about this experience was almost surreal. I look at where I am right now and then where I was one year ago today and they are such different mental states. I guess I never realized how much the re-entry culture shock had affected me until I resurfaced on the other side. I always look back and think about how I just recycled all of the information on re-entering that the UO Study Abroad Office had sent me and think of how silly that may have been. Anyway, I thought that in this blog post, I would share a little of what I said at the conference.

I studied abroad in Kefalonia, Greece, spring term 2008. After my study abroad program ended, I knew that I couldn't go home, not yet, so I found a job as a receptionist at a hotel on the island and lived there for another three months. I got back in mid-September 2008 and have been trying to find out how to get myself back there ever since. When I returned from my trip, it wasn't long before school started again. I had to quickly move into my new house in Eugene with a new roommate and get straight into the stress of the term. That first term back, and the one after it, were very hard. It took me almost a couple of months before I realized that I had kind of cut myself off from the world. I wasn't really hanging out with my friends. I would go out to get coffee or something, but usually solo. It dawned on me that the reason I wasn't interacting with my friends was because once I did, one people knew I was back, it meant that it was really over.

I immediately dove into the opposite strategy and started joining groups on campus, working, and hanging out with friends so much that I had no minutes left in my day. This didn't make me any happier. I thought about my friends, my family I had left in Greece. I was angry and sad that I truly had another family, but they were so far away from me and I couldn't know when I would be with them again. My experience had completely changed me at my core. I felt like such a stronger person. Yet when I got back into the routine of life back home, I felt like I had lost that person I had gained. Everyone assumed me to be the girl I was before I had left and treated me so. No one I talked to could really understand what I was going through, not even other study abroad returnees. The only solace I found in fellow returnees was that they at least understood that they could not possibly understand.

I loved that in Greece, every day was an adventure. I never knew if I'd be zipping along the coastline on the back of a scooter, swimming out into the endless Ionian Sea, or trying my first tentacle of octopus made special by my Greek friend's mother. When I returned home, the monotony of my scheduled days drove me crazy and left me feeling unfilled. I thought about Greece every moment of every day. I worried that my friends I had made there would forget me. Then, on Christmas Day, my cell phone text message inbox filled with international messages, each from a different part of my Greek family. "Kala Christougenna, agapi mou! Mou leipeis!" (Merry Christmas, my love! I miss you!) they would say. Toward the end of winter, I had begun working through a lot of my feelings and began a search to find out how to travel again, to get that feeling back.

I ended up landing a summer job in New York. Although it was not international, it was a place I had never been that was filled with culture. It was perfect. My job also employed several international students who I got to interact with daily. I began to truly know that Greece was only the beginning, that my love for travel would never leave me and that I would always find a way to get back into it. I spent this last winter break in Israel. I hope to get an internship in D.C. this summer and save up enough money to go to Ireland, oh, and, hopefully, as always, back to my home in Kefalonia.

I realized for study abroad returnees, it's nice to know you're not alone. I think that the Northwest Study Abroad Returnee Conference is an excellent opportunity for students and I'm glad that it exists. I think it was a definite step in my quest for not losing my traveling wonder.