A year abroad for all

As Michaelmas rolls around once again, I open my phone to the unmistakable signs of a new academic year at Oxford. Society committee pleas, ads for upcoming club nights, and emails welcoming a new wave of freshers fill my inbox and feed. But this year, scrolling through those familiar notifications leaves me with a feeling I did not expect. 

Now in my third year, the time has finally come for the long-anticipated, even longer-in-the-making ‘year abroad’. While friends return to Oxford, I find myself watching the new academic year unfold from a distance – no collections to revise for, no frantic search for a last-minute BOP costume, and no Plush Thursday to inevitably mark the weekend drawing near. 

As I sit writing this from Buenos Aires, Argentina, I feel deeply conflicted. Of course, there is a certain melancholy in watching friends slip so effortlessly back into the rhythms of university life. It can be oddly unsettling to see a place that has played such a significant part in my adult life carry on as though I had never left.

Yet simultaneously, I am glad not to be there. The concept of lining up for hall food, pulling an all-nighter in the library, or squeezing into the queue at Bully is significantly less appealing from 7,000 miles away. For all the nostalgia that comes with watching Oxford from afar, distance has also given me something I didn’t realise was needed: perspective. 

And no, this is not going to be a long rambling of how I ‘found myself on my gap yah’. Although, somewhere between getting on the wrong bus to work and confidently preparing mate in entirely the wrong way, I have started to wonder why an experience this valuable should be reserved for students studying certain subjects. 

There is something liberating about being somewhere where nobody knows your name, your college, or your subject. While abroad, I am no longer simply an Oxford student navigating the same routines of term-time life; I am an outsider, and, most importantly, a beginner again. The world suddenly feels much bigger than the few square miles I had grown accustomed to calling home.

It would be easy to romanticise this feeling. I am not Anthony Bourdain, travelling the world with a camera crew filming an episode of Parts Unknown. I am, instead, entirely reliant on a far less glamorous student loan, a questionably downloaded eSIM, and what appears to be a complete inability to read Google Maps.

Indeed, it can at times be overwhelming to think just how much I have left behind. Over two years’ worth of friendships, routines and rituals do not simply disappear because you board a flight. Friends are still there, returning to university for their final year, before graduating and stepping into the increasingly structured world of work. From a distance, it can feel as though everyone else is moving forward along a path that I have temporarily stepped away from.

For my friends back in Oxford, that step is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. With 78% of graduates reportedly worried about finding employment, and 71.9% already in professional-level roles within just 15 months of graduating, it is hardly surprising that the job market can feel overwhelmingly competitive. Talks of internships now dominate a FaceTime catch-up, and for many, there is little choice but to climb to the first rung of the corporate ladder as soon as possible. The opportunity to travel, experiment, and explore a different way of living (both personally and professionally) can all too easily be pushed aside in favour of getting on with the ‘more serious’ route of starting a career. 

That is precisely what makes the time away so valuable. It is a rare opportunity to step away from the well-trodden path for a while, without having to abandon it altogether. As more UK universities begin to offer years abroad across a wider range of subjects, it seems worth asking why Oxford should be any different.

The benefits are far from merely personal. I am now working at an Argentine news network, using a language I have spent years studying, but in an environment where getting the grammar right is rather less theoretical than it is in a classroom. Language students are fortunate in this respect: learning a language inevitably means learning something about the people and culture that speak it. But what about everyone else?

At its core, it is an exercise in empathy and human connection. A PPE student can encounter political and economic ideas outside the British context; a historian can experience another country’s relationship with its past; a scientist can apply their technical skills in a professional environment shaped by an entirely different set of assumptions. With funding available to make these experiences more accessible, there is little reason for the year abroad to remain the preserve of language students. Studying something is one thing; being forced to apply it somewhere unfamiliar is another.

With this may come the feeling of being out of one’s depth. But, certainly for me, that is the most important part. At a time when immigration, integration, and national identity occupy so much of British political debate, there is value in experiencing what it actually feels like to enter a society in which you do not automatically understand the language, the customs, or the unwritten rules. 

Here, I am a newcomer trying to work out how things are done. More than once, I have forgotten to kiss the cheek of a superior at work, or have asked for completely the wrong thing at a supermarket. With that comes a certain humility, as you become constantly more aware that integration is not simply a matter of arriving somewhere and expecting to feel at home – an all-too common attitude of ‘Brits abroad’. 

And perhaps that is the greatest argument for going abroad. Not because everyone needs to spend a Bourdain-esque year in South America, or because life in Oxford is somehow too small. It is because it is surprisingly easy to mistake the familiar for the universal. Living somewhere else forces you to question assumptions you did not even realise you had – about work, education, politics and culture, or even something as simple as whether a greeting calls for a firm handshake or a warm embrace and kiss on the cheek. 

Eventually, I will return to Oxford, and life will presumably slip back into its familiar rhythms. But I hope to return with a little more perspective on the bubble I have spent two years inhabiting – less convinced that Oxford is the centre of the world, and considerably more curious about everything beyond it.