Brainstorm Goals

• Academic Considerations
  • What is your intended major or concentration?
  • Do you have another interest or a complementary subject area that you want to explore (political science students may want to improve their language skills)?
  • Do you want to incorporate study abroad into your comps exercise?
  • Do you want to study one topic intensively, or take a variety of courses?
• Learning Style
  • Do you learn better in the classroom or in the field?
  • Do you like independent or guided learning?
  • Are you able to adapt to different styles of learning?
• Geographic Interests
  • Are you interested in a region of the world or a specific country?
  • Is there something happening in the world today that you would like to learn more about?
  • Is there a political system that intrigues you?
• Personal Identity
  • Do you want to explore family roots?
  • Do you want to live in your home country?
  • Are there historical or current factors in places around the world that may impact your experience there?
• Career Path
  • How important is an internship?
  • Do you have the language skills for an internship in your field?
  • What will help your graduate school applications or make your resume stand out?
• Other
  • Do you want to study abroad more than once?
  • How immersed in the culture do you want to be?
  • Anything else? Be sure to include any other factors that affect your decision to study abroad.

Identify Challenges

Now, think about what, if anything might prevent your from studying abroad. You can use the same brainstorming technique to record potential challenges. Possible challenges include:

• Family concerns
• Money
• Academic considerations
• Social, job, or athletic commitments

Set Priorities

Once you have answered all these questions, you can begin to set your priorities. Try ranking the factors that are most important to you. Put a 1 by Academic Considerations if that is most important to you and a 2 by social, job, or athletic commitments if they are a major factor. Some students rewrite their list, combining both sets of factors in order of importance and write goals statements which combine the most important factors. For example, “I want to find an affordable fall semester program which allows me to study several subjects at a university in South Africa,” or “I want to find a summer, field-based program that focuses on health care in a developing country.”

Communicate Your Ideas

Talk with your academic adviser and an OCS adviser to find out where your vision fits within the realm of possibilities. Sometimes program matches work out perfectly. Other times you may need to set some intermediate objectives to your goals.