By studying in a foreign country, students can hope to gain a new perspective on life

Hope all is well! I am studying abroad this semester in St. Petersburg, Russia. I should say straight away that I have no intention of convincing anyone to study abroad. You have an entire Office of Global Programs dedicated to that. It’s a lovely office with very helpful employees, but I am not one of them. And I certainly have no intention of convincing anyone to study abroad in Russia to do so without first experiencing that myself from beginning to end seems somewhat irresponsible. But I should also say that I think that, very often, when people your faculty, my peers, I myself talk about studying abroad, we have the wrong conversation.­­Students can also get a lot of exposure while studying in such universities and different course Global Production Engineering,Business and Bioinformatics.

In 1913, Andrei Bely wrote the novel Petersburg.I had to read it for a class on 20th century Russian literature last year. Bely was a Symbolist, which meant that everything in the book stood for something(s) else, which in turn meant that I understood very, very little of the novel and even less of what the class which seemed to primarily consist of freakishly brilliant academic youths who knew everything there was to know about Symbolism discussed. Despite that, there is one idea from this bizarre book that stuck with me. At the beginning of the novel, one of the main characters imagines two men, and they suddenly appear in the flesh and start following him down the street. This becomes one of the themes of the book—in Petersburg, a city that came into being because one man (Peter the Great) imagined it would be so, that which exists in your mind exists in life. I would like to formally apologize to my professor and all former classmates in the event that I completely misinterpreted this motif.

That, to me, is what study abroad is, or at least what I think it should and hope it will be. Students are required and require ourselves to spend the majority of our time in our heads. To learn a foreign language, literature, or culture is to read books, have discussions in class sometimes with freakish scholars of Symbolism, and think. But to go to the place wherein that culture is alive is to be a character in Bely’s book. That which was once only in the mind knowledge, theoretical appreciation, vocabulary lists that were crammed in the night before a test, etc. is now on the street.Someone once told me that while it’s all well and good to want to expand one’s mind through travel and exposure to another culture, desire doesn’t necessarily need to be fulfilled while one is an undergraduate. And, to a certain extent, Someone is absolutely right. There are many excellent reasons not to study abroad in college: it’s expensive; we only have four years with you, Columbia; study abroad programs are now little more than glorified vacations (this one potentially doubles as a reason to go abroad, but that is neither here nor there); the rest of the world isn’t going anywhere except Venice, which is sinking, so if anyone’s studying Italian, get ye to a gondola.

In another sense, however, Someone was wrong. The point isn’t to study while abroad, but to experience the tension of the juxtaposition of studying and being abroad—to try to reconcile what was only in one’s mind with what one sees and hears and smells all around, all the time. And, at the end of it all, to try to take that back off of the streets and into the mind and carry it back on an airplane, overseas, into the classroom at Columbia, and everywhere, always.I’ve never done this before, so I cannot say for certain, but I hope that it works both ways, and that that with which we normally live stays in our minds while we’re abroad. And I hope that with the distance and the memory we learn something about you, Columbia, and about ourselves, too that I to switch to the self-absorbed for a moment) will come to perceive New York’s gritty, pretty city streets, my professors, and my peers in a way that I didn’t when I was living all of that.Bely’s Petersburg is really hard to understand. As my professor said,If you don’t finishing the book saying, ‘WTF,’ you didn’t get it again: formal apology if that is a
misrepresentation of the lesson. I can only hope that real-life Petersburg and everyone else’s metaphorical Petersburgs is even harder.