Helping Your Student - Upon Return

Helping Your ISEP Participant Readjust

Returning to the Home Instituton
Make sure your student plans ahead for their return and finds out what they will need to do to arrange for financial aid, pre-registration and housing. Taking these steps will facilitate their adjustment to the home institution.

Reverse Culture Shock
Your student can experience culture shock when they return to the United States. They may have adjusted well and learned to enjoy the culture in the host country. Upon their return home, they may experience disorientation and a yearning for the host culture. The student has changed while their friends and family may have stayed the same — or changed in other ways. Returnees are often disappointed about the lack of interest in hearing about their experiences abroad or looking at their photos of friends and exotic sites. It may be easier for the student to cope with reverse culture shock if they remember that it is a necessary and valuable part of a study abroad experience — and that it will not last forever!

Encourage them to Share their Experience
The steps your student took to adjust to the host environment and cope with culture shock will be useful in their readjustment to the home environment: keep busy and set goals. The student needs to give themselves time to readjust and keep an open mind. Meanwhile, the returnee should be proactive in dealing with the situation. Students should take advantage of re-entry meetings or sessions offered by the home university, become a mentor for foreign students on campus, volunteer or get a part-time job in the study abroad office. Returnees want to remember and reflect on their experience and stay in touch with the friends they made abroad at the same time as they enter into the final phase of their education back home, strengthen old relationships and build new ones.