I’ve always considered studying abroad a fantasy. Women like me, coming from a conservative Muslim family, weren’t allowed to go outside without supervision, let alone to another country. It was simply unheard of. Yet, as if by fate, I was placed in a work-study position at my university’s study abroad office. By working there and helping students prepare for their programs, I began to inch closer to that fantasy of studying abroad. It wasn’t until one of my supervisors asked me, “What’s really holding you back?” that I seriously began to wonder the same thing.
In my personal experiences, there’s this illusion in the Muslim/South Asian community that studying abroad is a waste of time and money. If I brought it up with my parents, they’d scoff, “Why do you want to leave the country, when we struggled to come here?” They also feared that studying abroad would distract my academic plans and put me behind in my studies.
So, the first step I took was to educate myself. I began to research the programs my university offered and to figure out all of the details. I ended up choosing a summer program in Seoul, South Korea at Ewha University. Ewha is a prestigious woman’s university and they had strict rules against sexual harassment, which put some of my parents’ fears to rest. The length of the program, one month, was something I had to fight for, but it was just enough that I wouldn’t be gone for too long or too little.
