Seniors, Returning from Abroad, Feel Bewildered
By Chris Morocco

There is one thing that all Oberlin students who have studied abroad or taken time off have in common: at some point they all had to come back. Regardless of where students studied or what they did, they eventually found themselves facing the prospect of returning to Oberlin.
After two or more years of semester-to-semester grind, many juniors opt to take one or more semesters either to simply escape or to expand their educational horizon.
“I was burnt out,” Catharine Richert remarked, a senior who traveled around Australia last spring. Senior Sarah Kramer, who spent her
spring studying in Paris because, “Oberlin drives you crazy after a while,” also added that studying abroad was something she had always wanted to do.
Although some students take time off at some point during their college years, they are outnumbered by those who simply seek the opportunity to study someplace else. “[Studying abroad] is a break from Oberlin but not from school,” senior Shaadi Salehi, who studied last semester in spain, explained.
While abroad, many students experienced a “honeymoon period,” in which their new surroundings were immediately taken to be better than home.
The sights and smells of a new country, in addition to the time to enjoy them, make for a heady initial experience.
“Here [at Oberlin] I feel like I’m in a rush to go everywhere, even to Stevie,” Salehi commented.
Alaina Fotiu-Wojtowicz, who also studied in Spain last year, evoked another aspect of living abroad exclaiming, “The city I was in wasn’t huge, but I could go to other countries on the weekend.”
Several students found that they were stuck between the insular world of fellow American students and the distant world of locals that lay across a cultural divide. One senior expressed her surprise in finding that “it felt like freshman year all over again, trying to figure out how the school system worked. I felt like I was too old for that.”
Many Oberlin students expressed profound disappointment in the American students they studied with or came across in their travels. Senior Jonah Landman described the students in his friend’s program as being there just “to go to a cool city and drink.” Not wanting to over generalize, Landman posited that some programs seemed to have an abundance of fraternity and sorority members but that regardless of students’ backgrounds, “It was kind of an adventure: the guy from Queens, the guy from Utah and the guy from Connecticut, all just going somewhere together.”
Richert felt that going abroad for a semester was something she needed to do in order to keep Oberlin in perspective. “I worry that when I go out into the real world I will be among non-Obies,” she joked, “and that they will see me as the weird one.”
Students experienced varying levels of success in their ability to connect with residents of their foreign communities. Salehi used the image of a “cultural barrier” to describe the sensation of interacting with people in Cordoba, Spain, where there are a fair number of foreign students. Richert, on the other hand, described herself as being completely at ease with the Australians, who, she maintained, are “truly happy and friendly — at Oberlin that isn’t always the case, and in the U.S. that isn’t always the case.”
And then there’s the weather.
Returning to Oberlin under any circumstances, even after summer vacation or winter term, can pose challenges for any student. The ebbs and flows of students before each new semester mean that students finds themselves facing a new configuration of people and courses upon returning to school.
Nonetheless, the students who came back to school for spring semester after having been away in the fall expressed having had an exceedingly difficult period of transition.
“I felt really excluded when I got back,” stated senior Emily Jendrek, who went on to describe the shifts in her peer group that had taken place during her semester abroad in Florence.
Upon returning to Oberlin after a year in Paris, senior Annelies Fryberger noticed similar changes. “Life actually did go on while I was gone — relationships evolved,” she said. “My pitiful amount of correspondence actually did have an effect on my relationships.”
Three years ago, senior Kate Leddington spent a semester abroad before she decided to transfer to Oberlin in the spring. “People stop smiling in February,” she remembered.
The bonhomie of late summer seems to run out at some point during fall semester, leaving returning students with no other choice but to plunge back in, knowing that few people if any truly want to hear about their experiences.
Such was Kramer’s sentiment when she affirmed, “The hardest thing about being back on campus is feeling like I don’t have people to relate to about my experiences.”
Being back at school is nonetheless a reassuring contrast to life abroad for many students, in addition to the overwhelmingly comforting feeling that some students experienced upon returning to the United States.
One senior recounted, “As soon as I set foot in Cincinnati I thought — this is home! I’m going to get Taco Bell!”
It may take returning students of all types another few weeks to make the transition back to school. In the interim they will undoubtedly ponder whether Oberlin has changed or just themselves.