If you’re a student at university and you haven’t yet studied abroad, change that immediately!  Invariably, students who study abroad claim that it was one of the best decisions they made at university.  Studying abroad is truly a time fun as well as personal development.

As such, we have compiled a list of our top 10 reasons to study abroad.

1. Learn a second language

Unless you’re studying in a country that speaks the same mother tongue as you, you’ll likely become conversational or perhaps even fluent in another language.  Knowing a second language not only makes traveling easier, but also makes you more attractive to employers and even decreases your chance of Alzheimer’s.

2. Gain a world perspective

Regardless of where you grew up, you are indoctrinated with certain historical, political, and religious ideologies.  Being able to understand how and why things work in another country will give you a solid world perspective and make you a better citizen.

3. Make friends around the world

We have friends in probably about a dozen countries who we keep in contact with.  It will be almost impossible for you to not make local friends when you study abroad.  This enables you to further gain an even deeper global perspective, practice your new language, and also have friends to visit when you return to your study abroad city in the future!

4. Easier classes

Typically universities offer less challenging courses, less strenuous course curriculum, and less time consuming home work in study abroad programs.  So who knows, you might even boost your GPA while you’re abroad.

5. More opportunity to travel

You’ll probably have shorter class weeks and extended weekends.  If you’re in Europe, this means you have a ton of time to travel around the continent.  Flights through Skyscanner are generally anywhere from $50-200 to get anywhere in Europe. The longest flight we have taken in Europe was something like 3 hours.  This makes 3 day weekend trips to new countries a cake walk.

6. REAL education

Sure you’ll learn from textbooks in your classes, but more importantly, you’re going to learn from the source.  You can read a dozen books about Michelangelo and still not learn as much as you might standing in front of the David for 30 minutes.  Why read through a book when you can literally walk through history?

7. Become more culturally rich

Experiencing a culture first hand is the best way to enrich yourself from a cultural perspective.  Sure, you can experience culture while traveling for short stints, but you really get to understand and embrace a culture when you live it.

8. Freedom

College is innately more “free” than high school as you gain more independence, freedom, and responsibility.  Take that freedom and multiply it by 10 and that’s what you’ll experience abroad.

9. Create opportunity

From international job opportunities to a simple resume boost, studying abroad will create opportunities for you once you graduate from college.

10. You will have the best time of your life

You will literally make some of the best memories that you can imagine.  Sure, Greek life, athletics, etc. will potentially take up a major part of your college career and will ultimately create many fond memories.  However, studying abroad will probably be your best memory from college.

One of the major reasons that Florence, Italy was chosen to be the home base for Couple’s Coordinates was that Michael studied abroad there in 2011.  Alex had visited Italy but had never actually been to Florence before this trip.  However, Michael’s love for the city, familiarity, basic understanding of Italian, and small group of local friends in Florence were a major selling point and made our decision quite easy when thinking about where to move abroad.

For those of you who have studied abroad before, where did you go and what were your favorite things about studying abroad?  Did you begin traveling much more frequently after your time living abroad?