After Approval

After Approval

Preparation and Orientation

In the second half of the semester before your departure, you will need to come to an OCS orientation meeting, at which you will be given general advice and an information packet. (You can download a PDF copy of the latest Off-Campus Study Handbook, included in the packet, from this website.) Your program will give more specific assistance on such matters as visas, health, and preparatory reading. But even at an early stage of your planning, it will help to anticipate some of what you will be dealing with.

Preparing for a new environment. Whether you will be away for a semester or a year, in a culture similar to or very different from your own, you are likely to experience some adjustment difficulties. The excitement of your first few days can be followed by frustration as you realize that the assumptions and rules by which the host culture operates are quite different from those that you are used to: in, for example, such matters as conformity and individualism, privacy, social structure, formality, gender roles, and punctuality, as well as in more obvious areas such as food and dress. A simple business or social contact can leave you feeling helpless or awkward. Such feelings show that you are coming to grips with a new culture. You will need to employ what you learn in classes about that culture to help you understand its implicit social rules; explore and analyze the unfamiliar with an open mind; avoid the temptation to retreat into the company of other Americans; and remember that just as you would resent being regarded as representative of everything American, so you should not generalize too quickly about your host culture from your first experiences. You will probably find that you adjust soon, and come to look at yourself and your own culture differently. But you should also be prepared, finally, for another difficult -- sometimes even more difficult -- phase of adjustment when you return to the U.S. and to Bowdoin.

Some advance reading will give you insight into how other people have coped with challenges. The following helpful publications can be found in the OCS Office:

  • B. Hansel, The Exchange Student Survival Kit
  • W. W. Hoffa, Study Abroad: A Parent's Guide
  • L. R. Kohls, Survival Kit for Overseas Living
  • T. J. Lewis and R. E. Jungman (eds.), On Being Foreign: Culture Shock in Short Fiction
  • R. M. Paige and others, Maximizing Study Abroad: Students' Guide to Strategies for Language and Culture Learning and Use
  • K. Wagner and T. Magistrale, Writing Across Culture: An Introduction to Study Abroad and the Writing Process

A DVD of the 30-minute film Journeying Home, made by CET Academic Programs, is also available for viewing in the OCS Office. Your program or Bowdoin professors may well be able to suggest additional books, both fiction and non-fiction, that will help you understand the culture in which you will be living and studying. Many foreign newspapers and magazines are available on the Web and in the Bowdoin Library and Language Media Center. Foreign-language TV news and other programming can now be viewed in the OCS office.