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Basic Things You Should Know Before You Go

A little bit of knowledge can go a long way to establish good relations with the host culture(s) of your study abroad country. For instance,

• Do you know if you should you bring a gift to your host family?
• How formal should you be with your hosts?
• What should you expect in terms of how to register for your classes?
• What are some major political issues facing your host country?

Having knowledge about your host country helps you get into conversations and shows your respect for the culture. Take some time to investigate the following topics – use the internet, foreign newspapers, and magazines or ask a person from your host country:

• Names of political leaders and political parties; type of government
• Major religion(s)/spiritual beliefs and their effect on the host country
• Hot topics of the day (e.g., government scandals)
• Recent conflicts and the role of the U.S. in those conflicts
• Year of independence and circumstances
• Economic conditions
• Cultural diversity (immigration and refugee populations, etc.)
• Class structure (e.g., what will your status as a student be in this country? What percentage of students in your host country go to college?)

Stereotypes & Generalizations

Stereotype: the unfair, often inaccurate, prediction that a person will be, act, look, feel, or believe a certain way based on one's often incomplete or uncontextualized observations about the person's culture, nationality, race, gender, age, socio-economic status, etc.

Consider carefully whether your assumptions about your host country are based on fact or on stereotypes. Stereotypes, both positive and negative ones, are harmful and can impair your ability to get the most from your study abroad/away experience.

What’s the alternative? A generalization. This means using initial ideas about a group to form hypotheses. For example, you’ve been watching British television and note the dry sense of humor that forms the basis for several sitcoms. Then you meet several Brits who also have a dry sense of humor. You begin to form a hypothesis about British humor. Generalizing recognizes there may be a tendency for people within a culture group to share certain values, beliefs, and behaviors.

Becoming Familiar with Culture: The Iceberg Analogy

The tip of the iceberg represents the pieces of culture that we can see. The area below the water represents deeper cultural meaning. The iceberg analogy has some key points for learning about a culture:

• The things we observe almost always have deeper meaning, that is, they represent a more fundamental cultural value. Although the iceberg separates culture into visible and invisible elements, these are almost always interrelated.
• What we think we see is not always what is going on. Even trickier is how a visible aspect of culture, something so seemingly obvious as laughing, can have very different meanings in different cultures. For example, laughing can mean “that’s funny” or “I’m embarrassed.”
• We interpret what we see in the host culture as we would in our own, but the actual meaning may be quite different.

Travel Journaling

Consider changing the structure of your journal from a daily "diary" to a "travel journal", like the one developed by Nancy Taylor Nicodemus, which divides your journal into four different sections: Impressions, Descriptive, Narrative, Expressive

• The Impressions Section is for jotting down the places, people, events, concepts, ideas, smells, signs, and other things you remember. You write words, phrases, or sentences that will spark your memory.
• In the Descriptive Section you will not elaborate on what you think about what you are writing. Instead, you will use your descriptive abilities to create a vivid picture of what you experienced.
• The Narrative Section is to satisfy the storyteller in you. There’s no doubt you will come home with stories – good, bad, funny, and otherwise. Write about them in this section before you forget.
• In the Expressive Section you get to vent, debate, praise, hypothesize, and evaluate. Where you may have described an event in one of your descriptive sections, you may then make an entry in this section to record what you thought and felt about that event.