Junior Year Abroad and Back Home Again
A wise guide
This spirited little book should be a wise guide to any college student about to go to a foreign country for any length of time. Lucid and direct, it offers practical tactics for negotiating a different culture. The simplicity and the proven effectiveness of the exercises should allay the anxieties of the student/traveler. I can wholeheartedly recommend it, and will give it to my college age nieces and nephews.
Nancy Cirillo, faculty, Wellesley College, 1978 - 2005
A worry-free return
Although students going abroad to study for a year look forward to the experience with great excitement, they can also be filled with trepidation about having to live in a foreign culture for the first time. This book offers them lots of useful information and provides them with practical exercises that will not only make them feel comfortable while living in unfamiliar surroundings but also prepare them for a worry-free return to their native land. I wholeheartedly advise all students planning to spend a year abroad to make this book the first thing they throw into their backpacks.
Matthew Ruggiero, PhD, Boston University, College of Fine Arts
A book that is essential to have for students traveling abroad
Junior Year Abroad and Back Home Again is a refreshingly honest approach to understanding what students should anticipate during the time they spend living in another country. What is also delightful is that the authors also provide insight concerning what students should expect upon their return back home. Myhill and Ballerino-Cohen masterfully create a balance between providing the reader with information about living abroad coupled with exercises that provide ample opportunity for personal reflection. This is a rare and refreshing combination. This book is a must-have for any student who is considering expanding their horizons and living in another country as part of their studies.
Katherine E. Morrison, Phd, on Amazon.com
A Guide to the Experience
I wish I’d had a copy of Grace Myhill and Colleen Ballerino Cohen’s Junior Year Abroad and Back Home Again (ISBN 1-4208-8651-7) to give to a young woman I know before she ventured off to Russia last summer. Having the book in hand would have made a good trip even better by providing her with a framework for anticipating and understanding her experiences. It also would have helped her with her “re-entry” when she returned home.
The book describes the four phases of the Cycle of Culture Shock, identified by the authors as Honeymoon; Hostility, Frustration, and Loss; Adjustment/Adaptation; and Appreciation, and guides the reader through the feelings s/he is likely to experience in each phase. The book is interactive, and presents questions for the reader to reflect on and answer, with space on the page to do so.
In “Chapter Three: Feelings of Hostility, Frustration, and Loss...,” the authors suggest two activities to help the traveler adjust: drawing a map of the surroundings, in order to begin to develop a sense of “placeness,” and asking a new friend to describe something s/he does, such as shopping for groceries, in detail, as if giving a “grand tour” of the activity. The authors aptly explain that understanding such “cultural details” will help the new arrival begin to feel at home.
The style of the book is perfect for those embarking on what is most likely to be an exciting and eventful adventure, for it can be browsed or read in small snippets and worked on intermittently. For some of the suggested activities—for example making a memory collage—it would be nice if the pages were larger, but then the book would not be so handily packed in a carry-on bag or tucked in a backpack.
Although written specifically for college undergraduates participating in Junior Year Abroad, this little book will be helpful to anyone who will be spending time in another culture. With some adaptation, it would have served well for my daughter, who traveled to France when she was fourteen, or even for those embarking on an Elderhostel trip.
This book is of interest to social workers because it provides a guide to working with those who have had or are about to have an experience that has the potential to alter their sense of self and community. It could easily and effectively be used by school social workers and social workers who counsel college students, or by anyone in the role of preparing young adults or others for an experience in another culture.
And yet one of the greatest benefits of the book will occur after the reader has returned home, for Myhill and Cohen acknowledge that the Cycle of Culture Shock continues as the traveler re-enters a formerly familiar environment. The book provides a guide for this experience, too, and normalizes such things as changes in self, friends, and relationships. The book even guides the reader in thinking about leaving the place s/he has come back to, and what may come next.
-- Jeri Field, MSW in the September, 2007 issue of FOCUS, the monthly newsletter of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Social Workers
