Study abroad is frequently framed as life-changing. The narratives are familiar: expanded horizons, newfound confidence, personal growth. But for many students, particularly those historically underrepresented in international education, the reality can feel more complicated.
Will this be an affirming experience, or an isolating one? Will it create opportunity and connection, or place students in unfamiliar environments without meaningful support? These are the questions that have stayed with me throughout my career in international education and ultimately became the foundation of my doctoral research.
These are not new questions. In 1944, Elsa Goveia left her home country of Guyana to study at University College London on scholarship, the beginning a stellar academic career. Similarly, Merze Tate, an early 20th century maverick, undertook her first foreign sojourn to France as a 26-year-old schoolteacher.
She went on to become the first African American to earn a graduate degree at Oxford. She was a committed advocate for travel in its earliest academic iterations. Yet, she and Professor Goveia remain largely overlooked figures.
Over the past few years, I’ve spent time speaking in depth with Black women from US universities who studied abroad in London. Via a series of interviews, I sought to understand not only what they did while abroad, but how they made sense of those experiences, and were perhaps shaped by them during and after their experiences abroad.
What emerged wasn’t a single story, but a unique variety of shifts.
Many described a growing sense of confidence. Others spoke about changes in how they navigated relationships, set boundaries, or imagined their futures. For some, study abroad was a gateway to academic clarity; for others, it offered a degree of freedom to think differently about their career paths and personal ambitions.
One recurrent theme was the importance of stepping outside familiar contexts and seeing themselves in new ways. That does not diminish very real experiences of microaggressions or exclusion. Those moments existed too, but alongside them were experiences of recognition, possibility, and expansion that felt meaningful and, in some cases, deeply lasting.
For prospective students, especially those who don’t always see their experiences reflected in study abroad narratives, these stories matter. They offer a more complete image of the study abroad landscape.
This work is also shaped by my own experience as a nomadic student who has lived and learned on three continents. When I studied in London during my undergraduate degree, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for what I was navigating. Nonetheless, I remember a sense of expansion, altered vision, and returning indelibly changed. That perspective continues to inform how I approach and make sense of this research.
At its core, my aim has been simple: to listen carefully and center the voices of the students who generously opted into my study.
If study abroad is going to deliver on its promise, it must work for a broader range of students, in practice as well as in theory
If study abroad is going to deliver on its promise, it must work for a broader range of students, in practice as well as in theory. This means more emphasis on belonging, examining what support genuinely entails, and how programs are experienced, not just designed.
There is a resurgence in interest in these questions across the sector, and I’ve had the chance to share elements of this work in assorted spaces along the way. I am invested in the hope that these insights do not remain static, that they transcend the research to drive valuable programmatic innovation.
As I enter the final stages of writing my thesis, that focus abides. These are not niche stories. They lie at the heart of our understanding of what international education is, and what it can become.
About the author: Kimberley Aparisio (she/her) is a final-year PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education and PASS Director at CEA CAPA London, where she supports the development and delivery of global education programs. She has 20 years of experience in international education, with a career spanning leadership roles at Minerva University, NU London, and IES Abroad London.
Kimberley earned her BA in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Education and International Development from the UCL Institute of Education. Her doctoral research examines how study abroad from the US to the UK impacts the identities of Black women in higher education.
