Rachel LaFlamme ‘20J | Contributing Writer
Studying abroad is a privilege, and we need to talk about it. No, I’m not talking about some rich white girl saying, “Wow, it was such a privilege to be in London for a semester and get to learn about the culture.” I’m talking about how much financial privilege it takes to study abroad.
Maybe it was dumb of me not to see this coming, but the fact of the matter is I didn’t. I had the privilege to study abroad in New Zealand. I studied statistics at the same university where the R coding language was born.
But I really didn’t know what studying abroad was all about. My mom immigrated to the United States to have the privilege to study here — her version of studying abroad. When she heard that Smith would let us study anywhere in the world with the same tuition fee as attending school in Northampton, she told me it was a chance I couldn’t pass up. Just like any classic Smith student would, I took it.
I took this chance because I have lived in the United States bubble my entire life, and I really didn’t get the chance to see different perspectives from different countries. That’s what I thought study abroad was — to study and learn in an entirely different location. But it’s not. It’s the world’s biggest lie.
I say this because of the people I met here. Maybe it’s not everyone’s experience, but it was definitely mine. Being away from home and starting a new life in an entirely new country for only a semester is difficult. I went and joined the group of students studying abroad at the University of Auckland. It was the most logical thing for me to do. I met people from everywhere: Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and the United States. It was good. It was so nice to meet people who were going through what I was going through: starting over. I thought we were all on the same playing field, but we clearly weren’t because privilege exists everywhere. I found myself in a sea of questions about where I was going to visit the upcoming weekend or if I was going to go out that night. At first, I thought it was just getting to know other people, so I gladly went along with it, and soon enough they became the most familiar faces to me on campus. They were my friends. As the classic story goes, friends are vital to making experiences good ones.
I realized a little too late that my study-abroad friends might be the wrong friends to make.
As a side note: I have never really experienced what I thought of as financial privilege before. I always thought of myself as well off. Sure, the only reason I went to Smith was because it was the school that gave me the most financial aid and was the only reason I could possibly get a college degree without taking a year off to work in order to pay for it. Sure, I had work-study and always thought that the ten-hours-a-week limit was a little ridiculous because I thought people needed more hours to get by and pay for school. Sure, I had to work forty hours a week all summer to pay for my own college tuition. And sure, I am graduating a semester early because I can’t afford all four years at Smith to get my degree, but at the end of the day, I had enough money to sustain myself. Smith housed me and fed me, and loans helped me forget how much financial debt I was actually in, but the money from work helped me buy new clothes when I needed it and go out every once in a while. I never felt trapped because I always had to work or study, and my friends were just a quick walk down the street. Northampton didn’t need expensive exploring; just a nice day to window-shop and you were well-acquainted with the town. Day to day, I was happy with the money I had.
Being in New Zealand was different. I didn’t realize that everyone’s mentality when studying abroad was that they were literally going to be on vacation for the entire semester. No one really warned me of that. My idea that study abroad was just going to study elsewhere for a semester shattered.
Picture this: I had a friend complain to me that both her credit cards were maxed out. Why? Because she had bought not one, not two, but six plane tickets the night before, but she wasn’t stressed because her parents just opened another bank account for her so she could still have money. This was the person who flew to Fiji, Vietnam and different parts of New Zealand every weekend. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I think that plane tickets are expensive, and I’m not spending that much money to do it every weekend.
But that’s what happened here. Everyone didn’t live this way, but most road-tripped somewhere new every weekend and flew out maybe two or three times during the semester. Additionally, people didn’t study because they didn’t care. Their grades only required them to pass, so with the extra time, they went out bar-hopping a lot. I’m not saying bar-hopping and exploring often is bad, but living like this is so financially draining.
The reality was that these people were my friends. They were the first people I connected with. I didn’t realize that in order for me to keep up with these friendships, I would have to pay a price: a cup of coffee, a dinner, a movie, a drink at a nice bar. There was always a price tag, but all I could afford was the price to buy my weekly groceries because of the stipend Smith gave me. So over time, I felt I lost the friends I started out with.
It didn’t end in drama. It ended with me not being able to financially keep up with their lifestyle. I had to decline every invite that came up in the group chat because I knew I couldn’t afford it, and I wanted to make sure I had enough money to buy a plane ticket home and eat healthily each week. It’s sad because I felt anxious even buying a cup of coffee for myself. I knew it would be cheaper to make it at home, and so in the end, I wouldn’t end up buying it. I bought a drying rack so I wouldn’t have to pay $3 to dry each load of laundry. I even walked everywhere to save money.
In the same way, I had to blow off so many plans to hang out and potential fun nights because I needed to save my money for the fundamental basics. But it resulted in me losing friends.
It seemed pathetic to try and explain the reality of the situation. Eventually, I stopped being invited to things, which spiraled into me feeling isolated and alone in a place that still felt so new.
It was the first time in my life that I cried almost every other week about money. Money caused me to cry because I was anxious wondering if each purchase was worth it. Money caused me to cry because I felt like I couldn’t keep the friendships I had started at the beginning of the semester. Money caused me to cry because it was the harshest wake-up call to privilege I have ever had to face.
I am a person of color, queer and a woman. I understand privilege. In some scenarios, I have privilege, and in others, I don’t. However, this privilege was different. All these identities affected everyday decisions, but this financial privilege seemed to be laughing in my face while the other privileges were muffled whispers in the background.
To all the people that can afford to travel a lot when studying abroad: know that you are lucky that you have a chance do that. But to those who are like me and really just didn’t know, this is a warning: it takes financial privilege to study abroad.
This isn’t to say “don’t study abroad.” It’s far from it. It’s just that study abroad is often romanticized so that we believe that it will be a healthy, manageable balance between travel and studying and, when the time comes, it’s not. Many of us struggle to handle just the academics. But it can come as a shock — at least it did for me — how much it was expected of me to travel, spend money and come back from this magical journey thoroughly changed and inspired. This is a warning to minimize the lifestyle shock that comes with the study abroad experience. I guess it’s in the fine print and people subconsciously know this, but I wanted to bring a magnifying glass to the whole situation.
