WLC 420 - Maximizing Study Abroad
Course Description
Your study abroad experience is potentially a rich opportunity for you to enhance your language skills and deepen your understanding of other cultures, people and their practices. This course provides the resources to help you prepare for your study abroad experiences. Taught in English. Fulfills MLO 5.
Your study abroad experience is potentially a rich opportunity for you to enhance your language skills and deepen your understanding of other cultures, people and their practices. This course provides the resources to help you prepare for your study abroad experiences. Taught in English. Fulfills MLO 5.
Reflective Narrative
Maximizing Study Abroad naturally helped to prepare us for our study abroad experience, as well as putt together our study abroad blog. By teaching appropriate intercultural communication skills and what to expect when studying abroad, we were able to better appreciate and make use of our preparations of what we were to experience. The course also guided us through the application process to our varying Universities so we could actually make it to Japan. We were taught how to prepare for disaster, natural or otherwise, and overall how to survive in an environment completely different from our own since, for many of the students, it would be their first time staying longterm in another country and culture completely different from their own. The most useful thing I learned in this class was the stages of culture shock, a concept that I had heard of but not been completely aware of what it entailed. It was really helpful to know what to expect when I was abroad as, along with many of my fellow Japanese majors, I had never lived abroad before. My honeymoon phase at the beginning of my arrival was characterized my initial excitement and fascination with the culture, but I was prepared for any negative feelings that could followed thanks to what this class prepared me to expect as a stranger in a foreign land. Fortunately I did not experience culture shock to the extremities that were described to me in this class, most likely due to the short amount of time I had stayed there; a single semester consisting of only four months of study verses a two semester stay. Without having taken this course I can't imagine how differently my study abroad experience might have gone.