Overseas education & global awareness. Two sides of the same coin
You are one of the lucky ones. You’ve got the opportunity to pursue academic excellence in one of the top international study abroad destinations, and grabbed it with both hands. Bravo.
Academics and a successful career, of course, are the main reasons for your choice to study abroad. A rather indirect benefit, as a result of this choice, would perhaps play even more important role in shaping you as a person and stay with you for a lifetime. And that is Global Awareness.
It may sound simplistic and even irrelevant. It is anything but. Here’s why…
Leadership Qualities: An inevitable result of studying abroad is being exposed to global ways of conducting things. Personal and professional development thus, is an obvious outcome. Overall development is the foundation of leadership qualities. There will be time, soon enough after you complete your studies or even when you are pursuing studies, when your leadership qualities are called upon.
It is during those moments, what you have learnt and absorbed during your pursuit of academic excellence, would summon the leader in you. The decisions you’d take would be based on awareness that you may have cultivated from global perspectives.
Communication Skills: In all probability, you would be studying and / or living with other students from at least four-five different backgrounds / cultures / nationalities. Living in a foreign country, and on top of it, mingling with people with different outlooks from different countries will develop and enhance communication skills.
You will have to interact with them, and will soon figure out that in order to have an effective communication, you need to communicate with them in a way that makes sense to them. Voila! That’s how easy it could be.
Respect & Bonding: A lot is being said about how cut throat the professional life is. However, the success of most top-100 global giants is driven by people-positivity and interpersonal equations. It is because they hire the professionals who respect cultures and have the capability to bond despite the differences.
Imagine living and befriending students from every continent in your college. Their culture would be totally alien to you. As you start understanding the difference and develop a sense of comfort and respect, you’d ease into a friendship with them; bond with them on a different level altogether. This kind of awareness about people from every part of the globe will simply put you on a pedestal.
There are several other experiences about global awareness – traveling, linguistics, art, etc. that you would earn while studying abroad. And when you apply those experiences in practical and professional life, you’d realise the fact that you have pursued not just academics excellence but also global excellence.
Good luck to you, future global citizen.