4 lessons after 4 months in 4 minutes: takeaways from my ongoing journey as an international student

 The first international student there is written record of is Emo of Friesland, a Frisian scholar who attended the University of Oxford in 1190 and paved the way for almost a millenium of international students.

And, of course, lots of things can happen in a millenium: in fact, that is about 33 human generations. Think about all the things that your grandparents went through, sum it with all the experiences of your parents and add it up to your own ones. Now, multiply it by 11 and you get a small grasp over the amount of things that can happen in a millenium.

Yet, the human act of going to another country to educate ourselves has survived that long. We have overcome long wars, rough winters and unsufferable visa offices to kept going on this wonderful journey of education: we have done it. Cheers to us.

Lesson 1: The importance of self-assurance

Talking about cheers, the first lesson that I have learnt in these four months is how important it is to recognize your own achievements, no matter how small they might seem. Coming from a background where nothing was ever celebrated because there were no means to do so, something that has helped me feel better in various occassions is congratulating myself.

It can be a chocolate, a coffee or just a small walk to the park: if you do not celebrate your small victories, there is no point in achieving them. And tiny achievements might seem worthless at first, but there are no big victories without small ones.

Even if no one is there to celebrate your achievements, you can always do it by yourself. In that case, the challenge comes in other way: recognizing them. And this is such a personal matter that there is potentially no advice helpful in achieving it.

After all, every person has different definitions of achievement. And all of them are equally valid.

Lesson 2: The unpredictability of homesickness

Something I was very proud about during my first two months was how immune I felt to homesickness. In fact, I did not really understand what was it all about until I left my home-far-from-home, Mostar. I wrote a little more about it in this other post.

This is quite a big topic to cover in this post: indeed, I think it is a topic that can never be fully covered. And that is, in itself, one of the lessons I have learned: homesickness comes in various ways, at various moments and in various degrees of intensity. The thing is that you never know any of those three.

At least not until it arrives.

Lesson 3: No fair comparison ever exists

In my school, I study with people from well over 100 countries of the world. Every single one of us comes from radically different schooling systems, with different opportunities and a set of life experiences so apart from one another that it is completely senseless for academic competition to exist.

Yet, it does. And this is not necessarily bad, but it is completely unfair. Competition can be undisputedly considered as fair when it depends on the effort and success of different parties towards achieving a certain goal: however, when different parties have absurdly different conditions to compete, the competition loses sense.

And the hard part about accepting this is that competition will still always exist. There will always be someone with a better grade that you want to achieve and someone you will feel a certain academic pity against. The challenge is accepting this and learning to live with it.

Lesson 4: Nothing is ever enough (and that’s okay)

As I am writing this post, I am spending my break in Porto after finishing my first term at the United World College in Mostar. A year ago, I was wondering if I could ever manage to travel to Europe on my own and had no concrete plans for my future had I not been accepted to UWC.

Yet, I feel the same sense of insatisfaction and hunger for more I felt back then. Even if I am living a dream and I could not be a little more thankful for it, I still feel that I am not doing enough. I still feel that there is always more work to be done.

This is directly correlated to what made me become an international student in first place: a never-ending hunger for more. An eternal flame that makes us endure everything not just to learn more, but also to make our world a better place: while some Airbnb hosts might think otherwise, I feel that the trace left behind international students tends to be positive.

And I think all of this is wonderful. I don’t know what our dear Emo of Friesland was thinking when he first enrolled in the University of Oxford, but I truly think he made the first step towards something beautiful. Something we are all a part of.