Editorials

10 Signs You’ve Become A Cliché Year Abroad Student

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29 July 2019

By Bronwen

For those of us that have just finished the last chapter of our experience living outside the UK, the post year abroad life can be a bit of a challenge. Not only because the adventure is over but because you have to deal with the fact that whether you know it or not, you’re probably a typical year abroad student now.

If you find yourself relating to a few of these year abroad clichés, then I’m sorry, but you’re now a basic study abroad student.

1- Your Instagram highlights are coordinated by trips you’ve been on.

credit: https://www.instagram.com/chantelleph/

If your Instagram doesn’t look like this by the time you finish your year abroad, why even bother going? Half the reason anyone chooses to study a language is so you can flex on everybody as hard as this.

In fact, you probably just have a separate account for year abroad related posts to avoid spamming your main:

(Sorry if you feel attacked, @Channieenfrance)

2- WhatsApp has become your main source of communication.

You meet that many people with phone numbers from different countries that WhatsApp is the safest way to text without worrying about carrier charges.

3- You caption posts/tweet in your target language.

You’ve mastered being hilarious on Twitter in English, why not try it in Spanish?

4- Your sense of style is completely different.

Before going abroad, you would never have considered wearing a beret and now you own three.

5- You own an ancient mobile phone for your abroad number that looks like a drug dealer’s burner phone.

6- You have a ton of memorabilia from your city’s sports teams.

I’m actually typing this in eye-shot of my Fortuna Düsseldorf scarf.

7- You religiously uploaded videos and pictures to your ‘One Second a Day’ year abroad compilation in the hope of creating a masterpiece.

If you’re like me though, you’ll lose interest after a few weeks and your timeline will look as bad as this:

8- You are obsessed with FlixBus.

€3 to get from one major city to another? Yes, please.

9- You started a year abroad blog that you posted on 3 times then just kinda forgot about it.

(http://lizaperpignan.blogspot.com)

If you actually managed to post often and consistently during your entire placement then I salute you. As for the rest of us, I guess we all underestimated how busy we were going to be.

10- You’ve been tagged in this video (or a similar one) at least five times by your friends at home.

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