In support of the year abroad

Lizzie Fane is the founder of ThirdYearAbroad.com, a site designed by and for students to provide up-to-date information, help and advice about living, studying and working abroad during a university degree. She is available for student media interview – contact her directly or through the StudentMediaWire editor email.

There comes a time in almost every degree course when the subject of a year abroad is raised. For language students it is compulsory and, as such, eagerly and nervously anticipated. For students of other disciplines including History, Nursing, Law or Engineering, it is a culturally enriching and horizon-broadening opportunity that may have been unforeseen but is equally open to them.

As students of Italian, my friends and I looked forward to bicycling along cobbled streets, speaking the language fluently and being regularly mistaken for locals. There was concern about the extra financial strain and other pressures of living abroad, but many of us were supported by Erasmus grants and assumed that we would be overseen by our foreign universities or offices. I prepared myself by dying my hair dark, watching Italian teen movies with subtitles and getting a summer job as an au pair in Piemonte. Appearance, insight and experience: tick, tick, tick!

What I wasn’t prepared for however was feeling quite so out of my depth for the first few weeks. Finding and securing accommodation meant negotiations and form-filling, then I had to work out how, when and where to register at the university, attend classes as the only foreign student, set up insurance and a foreign bank account and plough through piles of paperwork to become a city resident – all in Italian and on my own. What I needed was someone to ask who’d been through the process already and could pass on reassuring tried-and-tested insider tips.

Having failed to find advice of this kind anywhere on or offline, I decided to set up ThirdYearAbroad.com to provide the information, help and support I had needed – all in one place. Students now use the site to find other people going to the same destination as them, pass on and share their top tips, create their own online guidebooks, learn new language study skills and get dissertation and career advice. When students contribute to the site, we ask them to write everything they wish they had known before they arrived abroad; this way, instead of making the same mistakes year after year, students can learn from each other’s, helping them settle in faster and benefit even more from their time abroad.

Setting up the business hasn’t been easy. While I had very generous help from work experience students, aspiring travel writers and our genius web developers at 3B Digital, it has taken time to bring individual universities round to the idea of sharing their year abroad information. We are making good headway however, with more and more universities inviting us to exhibit at their study abroad fairs and pre-departure talks over the next few months, so we’ll have a chance to speak to students face-to-face, uncover and solve their year abroad problems and reveal the dedicated support network available to them.

The benefits of taking a year abroad are many and varied; not only do students quickly develop invaluable life skills, they become more independent and self-sufficient, they understand foreign cultures and traditions, they create an international network of friends and, if they’re really lucky, they become fluent in the language. Graduates have a lot to gain from being bilingual, with the unique capacity to bring international business to any company they are employed by. However, the ability to speak another language fluently is really only possible if students live with locals, immerse themselves in the culture around them and make the most of the opportunity, which is what the year abroad is all about.