When I first stepped foot on my college campus, I had never left the United States, didn’t speak any foreign languages, and lived paycheck to paycheck from working a number of part-time jobs without any financial support from my family. When I graduated 4 years later, I had traveled to 19 countries, volunteered in a rural Guatemalan village, handled a multinational marketing strategy for a major NGO in the Middle East, learned Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, and had enough savings to backpack through South America for 3 months before starting a full-time job in New York City.The transformation of my entire life and outlook was enormous, and I never could have anticipated the importance of all the different elements that made these experiences possible. It’s only now, nearly 10 years and 50 countries later that I’m able to see what specifically set me on this course and how important my university’s role has been in shaping the course of my young adulthood.

To begin with, the college application process was daunting. My family didn’t have the money to send me to university, so my final decision was based on where I could get a full scholarship. Fortunately, I wound up attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which in addition to its generous academic scholarships for out-of-state students also boasts one of the most comprehensive offerings of scholarships for studying, working, researching, and interning overseas. It was an aspect of UNC I never paid attention to as a prospective student, but it made all the difference in my college experience, and in reality the rest of my life, once I enrolled.

Thanks to the rich array of opportunities and funding to match, I was able to study in Singapore, China, South Korea, conduct field research in Central America, and land an internship in Egypt — for free. Granted, I had to spend countless hours filling out applications and acing competitive interviews, but the opportunities were there. As a result, I spent more than 25% of my time in college overseas, and the experiences I gained from both studying and working abroad helped set me up for landing a job in management consulting and later in international sales and marketing. It wasn’t until I swapped stories with my peers at other universities that I realized how truly (and unintentionally) blessed I was to wind up at a college that actively prioritized sending students abroad — and helping them afford to do so.

Back then; I could never have predicted how important study abroad would be to me throughout my college experience. Study abroad offers the opportunity to learn about other cultures firsthand, learn or practice a foreign language, expand your global network, and even improve your prospects for employment after graduation. In general, it matures you into a more independent and tolerant person with a greatly improved understanding and curiosity about the world. Yet it didn’t even occur to me to look at how my school would help me gain this international experience (and even finance it) while I was in the midst of applying and contemplating moving halfway across the country when I had scarcely ever left my home state.

Like I experienced, most prospective students analyze a complicated matrix of qualities when choosing a college, including location, size and personality of the student body, strength of the academics, cost and financial aid, student-faculty ratio, and even job placement rates upon graduation, but they usually don’t stop to consider other programs or opportunities that only begin to matter after enrollment, like opportunities to study or work abroad.

A 2013 study from the Institute of International Education (IIE) found that about 280,000 American students studied abroad during the 2012-2013 academic year. While these numbers are a record high, study abroad — and especially students doing research or internships abroad — are still a tiny fraction of the 17.5 million of students enrolled in university in the United States (2015 National Center for Education Statistics). There is a substantial opportunity gap, particularly when it comes to minorities, first-generation college students, and those from lower income families. Students of certain academic disciplines, especially science and math, also find it hard to find opportunities overseas that are well matched with their rigorous curriculum.

If going abroad is a priority for you, it’s better to start planning for it sooner rather than later. By critically evaluating what opportunities a university provides prior to enrolling, you can rest assured by the time sophomore or junior year rolls around, you’ll have plenty of choice when it comes to selecting and financing your time overseas. Whether it’s a matter of cost or availability of suitable academic programs (and ones that honor credits earned overseas to help students graduate on time), it’s important to consider these factors before securing your place in the incoming freshman class.

Meeting other cultures is a big part of the study abroad experience

 Here is a list of questions to help you factor opportunities to gain international experience as an undergraduate into your college search. These questions are best directed at the office or department directly responsible for study abroad. A lack of this kind of dedicated office should be a red flag from the start.

• What programs are offered to study abroad?
• How much do they cost?
• Are there semester, yearlong, summer, and winter programs?
• Which do most students choose?
• What percent of students study abroad?
• What percent of those students receive financial aid to study abroad?
• When do most students go abroad?
• Do students go abroad multiple times?
• What percent of students go abroad multiple times?
• Are there scholarships for study abroad?
• How many exactly?
• Are they offered through the university itself or a third party?
• How are those recipients chosen: need or merit?
• What help is available to students seeking outside funding?
• What percent of students do internships?
• What percent are able to do internships overseas?
• What financial support is offered for students doing internships abroad?
• Is it need or merit based?
• Can I apply my federal financial aid towards the cost of a program abroad?
• Does the university offer its own study/work abroad programs or does it contract with other providers?
• Does the university recognize credits from a wide variety of programs or only the ones they specifically organize?
• Will studying abroad delay my graduation?
• Are there programs abroad available in my chosen program of study?
• Is there a foreign language requirement for this school?
• Does this school teach the foreign language I want to study and offer corresponding study abroad programs?
• I don’t speak a foreign language. What opportunities will there be for me to go abroad?
• What outlets are available for students returning from experiences overseas?

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Notice that these questions are very specific and don’t leave room for vague “yes” or “no” answers. For example, instead of asking, “Is there help available to students seeking outside funding?” Instead, ask more directly: “What help is available to students seeking outside funding?” This ensures that the college or study abroad representative speak in detail about what offerings they have (or don’t have). These questions also ask for percentages and other quantitative figures to describe the level of participation or support of study abroad in a concrete way.

By making study abroad an important part of your college selection process, you can help make sure that this aspect of your future college experience won’t be overlooked and result in limited opportunities to experience one of the greatest parts of being a university student.

Global Nomadic offers Professional Internships, Volunteer Projects and TEFL Programmes in 29 countries worldwide. Start travelling your career today!

 

A former NYC management consultant turned legal nomad, Elaina Giolando writes about the intersection of career, life, and travel for today’s 20-somethings. She currently works as an international media representative, traveling to a new country every 3 months to live and work. In her spare time, she focuses on providing her peers inspiration to proactively create rewarding and unconventional lifestyles. Follow Elaina on her blog Life Before 30 or @_LifeBefore30.

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I’ve been out of university for four years now, and both my study abroad and internship abroad experience have helped me build the international business career I have today — and the career I hope to grow for the rest of my life. In fact, I know that without my experience living and working abroad relatively early on, I would not have been qualified for some of the positions I have held in the past several years.

During college, my classmates mostly chose internships in banking or consulting, spending summer after summer in New York City or Chicago, performing similar tasks in similar environments, not only in terms of job-related repetition but also in terms of how they stood out in our peer group. Everyone, essentially, was trying to get to Wall Street and everyone was taking nearly identical paths to get there.

I proudly defied that norm. I spent summers studying international relations in Singapore, working for an NGO in Guatemala that had me designing small business plans in Spanish, and running the marketing initiatives of the Ashoka Foundation in their Middle East branch. When it came time to apply for a job post-graduation, I didn’t regret my decision to intern abroad and take an alternate path for a minute.

I actually landed every interview I wanted and beat out many of my classmates who actually interned in consulting, receiving an offer to join IBM’s Global Business Services division in New York City. Because my resume was very different from my peers and I learned how to share the experience I gained abroad in a way that was relevant to the consulting industry, it created a “package” that made sense to a wide variety of employers, both local and global.

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Benefits of Interning Abroad

As I learned firsthand, the benefits of having international internship are clear, universally well-regarded, and continue to pay out dividends many years after completion. Namely, there are four key benefits from working abroad as an intern:

1. Lends relevancy to other international roles. 

I’m famous for saying, “International experience begets international experience.” When hiring for a global role, or even a role that works cross-culturally in a domestic setting, human resource managers want to see demonstrated experience (as does anyone hiring for any job in any country at all). If your dream is to land a role that involves traveling or working on international projects, it’s a huge advantage to be able to prove that you’ve already worked successfully in similar settings. Getting that experience under your belt early on helps you get hired to do more and more of it.

2. Provides ability to transfer skills to international and domestic roles.

Working abroad lets you build a wide and deep skill set, often gained more rapidly than if you’d been working in your own country. A sample of skills obtained from interning abroad that are of interest to a wide variety of employers: working with ambiguity, communicating well, communicating across language barriers, communicating in other languages, forging new relationships, building trust, working in cross-cultural teams, problem-solving, overcoming a lack of resources, taking on additional roles and responsibility (probably above your experience level), adapting to unforeseen circumstances, understanding a new country and region, exercising patience, researching well, and testing out new ideas in foreign environments.

3. Makes your CV stand out.

When a hiring manager receives hundreds of CVs a day from comparably qualified candidates, he or she is looking for anything that makes one individual stand out over the others. Seeing that you worked in marketing in China for a summer and perhaps speak one or two foreign languages is an immediate draw. This is sometimes referred to as the “airport test.” The hiring manager thinks, “Would I want to be stranded in JFK for 5 hours with this person? Would they have interesting things to chat about over beers at the airport bar?” By standing out, you increase your chances of getting an interview, which often proves to be the hardest part of the job hunt.

4. Gives you better material to work with in interviews.

Once you’ve scored the interview, now is your chance to wow them with your reservoir of unique experiences. You have done the same things as any Wall Street intern — worked in teams, problem-solved, learned new skills, made some mistakes, and created value for your organization — but you’ve done it in an environment vastly different from any other candidate. Relating those quirky challenges and showcasing your seamless adaptability is one of the most important ingredients in nailing the interview.

 

8 Steps to Landing the Job

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the benefits of interning abroad, how do you actually use this experience to get a “real job” after graduation? How do you take experiences that seem to have occurred in the special time and space far away from home and convince a recruiter from Hartford, Connecticut that his firm in New York should hire you and not the other candidates who worked in a virtually identical role and environment last summer?

Let’s lay out an 8-step process to knocking it out of the ballpark.

1. Figure Out What Job You Want

This is a basic best practice for any job hunt, but you need to understand the exact role you want and research the companies that provide that kind of opportunity. Saying you want to do “something in international development” is not constructive for your search. Ideally, you should sit down and draft a list of your skills and experiences and, from that list, create a job description that matches both what you want to do and what you are qualified to do. Knowing specifically what you’re looking for will help you narrow down opportunities where you are a top contender.

2. Do Your Research

Before you even you apply to a job, you want to have done a good amount of research so you are able to tailor your CV and cover letter to address each requirement of the job description in your application. Good ways of doing this are to talk to current employees, read articles published on the company in the past few years, read through their website very carefully, and know as much about each opportunity as if you were already an employee. By conducting thorough research, you’re able to see how the company speaks about itself and reflect the tone and type of language back in your application materials. Telling your story in their lingo ensures that the fundamental importance of the work you accomplished is less likely to slip past them.

3. Focus on YOUR contribution

This is a very common error on many people’s resumes: not focusing on what they did, but on what the organization does. No hiring manager cares what the organization you worked for does (they can Google that); they want to hear about what your impact was. Focus on the skills gained through your individual experience and how the company gained specifically as a result of your participation.

4. Quantify Your Impact

Apply numbers that take what you accomplished from subjective to objective, and make it more credible to an outsider. For example, did you lead a team of 25, raise $10,000, gain 5,000 Twitter followers, collaborate with 15 other companies, or create a 5% increase in return on investment for the 2^nd largest project in the company? This is a practical way to “speak their lingo” — consulting firms, financial services companies, banks, international development organizations, and academics (really just about anyone) like to see numbers on a resume.

5. Tell a Story

Recruiters need a streamlined idea of who you are and why you’ve done what you’ve done. While we all know that many times we do what falls into our path or because it seems like a good idea at the time, that kind of logic doesn’t often land good jobs. For example, I had once had what could appear to be a discrepancy on my resume: why did I spend a summer working at an Egyptian NGO when I was an Asian Studies major studying Chinese? But once I wove the research I did on the Chinese diaspora in Cairo into my story, it made sense and conveyed more intention in my experiences. The best thing to do is to think about your career goals will be supported by a particular internship experience before accepting it, but at least weave it into a cohesive narrative afterwards if need be.

6. Be Prepared to Address Your Weaknesses

When I applied for my current job, I didn’t have any sales experience, so I used examples from my past where I exercised skills that prepared me to succeed in a sales role: researching, building relationships with clients, and presenting information. When I applied to be a consultant at IBM, I didn’t know much about spreadsheets or financial analysis, so I shared examples where I learned much harder things in an even shorter period of time. The key was proactively addressing areas of weakness in my resume and cover letter and then being able to demonstrate my claims in role-plays and case study interviews.

7. Practice for the Interview Stage

Every interview is one do-or-die chance at the job, but you can’t let the pressure get to you. The best way to combat the anxiety of an important interview is to practice, ideally with someone who already works in that company or industry. Then take it up another notch and find books written about how to ace job interviews in your specific industry. For example, before embarking on interviews with just about every consulting firm in the country, I bought the infamous Case in Point and practiced all of the case studies (several times over) with my friends from the business school. Eventually I was tackling even the toughest interview questions that my course of study or internship experience hadn’t prepared me for.

8. Create an Inventory of Experience

In my opinion, the best way to prepare for an interview isn’t to rehearse or outline specific answers to the most common interview questions. Instead, document a group of 15-20 experiences you’ve had that relate to the topics you’re likely to face in an interview: strengths, weaknesses, teamwork, leadership, challenges, and aspirations. Practice telling these stories and sharing the lessons they taught you so that you’ll be able to draw on those examples and relate them to whatever questions you’re asked on interview day.

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Bridge the Gap

Regardless of whether you did internships in California or Cameroon, the same principle applies: articulate your present skill set and past experiences with a well-researched enthusiasm that persuasively demonstrates your relevancy and capability to tackle the position you’ve got your eye on now. As long as you can communicate the depth of the contributions you’ve made to organizations around the world with confidence, you should have no problem translating those experiences into a full-time position.

Global Nomadic offers Professional Internships, Volunteer Projects and TEFL Programmes in 29 countries worldwide. Start travelling your career today!

 

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