This feature was written by Emily Rech in conjunction with OSU Global Opportunities.
Premed student’s honors thesis explores habit changes and shifts in self confidence of study abroad students post-experience.
Hunter Holdermann, a biohealth sciences major associated with the College of Science and Honors College, spent last spring in the IE3 Global accelerated language program in Heidelberg, Germany. Holdermann set out to learn German and fulfill his language credits in an immersive location, but was surprised to experience an immense change in himself and his sense of independence while abroad as well.
Upon returning to Corvallis for his senior year, Holdermann met with his Germanic studies mentor, Bradley Boovy, to try to get an understanding of why he had evolved so much as a person during his time in Heidelberg. He left this meeting with a new idea in mind: what if he reached out to fellow study abroad participants at OSU and asked them about their habit changes, using their empirical data to further research the personal impact of studying abroad for his honors thesis?
“I found that the aspects of studying abroad which stressed me out at the beginning of my experience, like ordering coffee in another language and figuring out public transportation, became the things I missed most once I was back in the US. I wanted to understand how these everyday experiences impacted me in such a major way over time.” This line of thinking would ultimately bring him to his honors thesis topic, titled “Shifting identities: Examining habit changes in long-term study abroad and cultural immersion experiences.”
Upon conducting interviews with his subjects, one of the most interesting findings that arose was that study abroad students all experienced culture shock and found an array of ways to adapt to this phenomenon, but all these coping mechanisms centered around embracing solitude as a means for reflection. Whether it was morning journaling, people-watching in town, or going on solo outings, students had a newfound desire for self-discovery. Holdermann even noted that towards the end of his stay in Heidelberg, he would purposefully do things by himself—like climb Zugspitze, the tallest mountain in Germany—because he wanted to use the alone time to reflect on both his time abroad and his life experiences leading up to that point.
One of his subjects used morning journaling exercises to reflect during her time abroad, stating that “having time to myself to sit in my own thoughts and process my own life and my own experiences was kind of difficult when I hadn’t done it before, and I never truly gave myself time to do that before.”
Along with stimulating self-reflection in participants, Holdermann identified how long-term study abroad and cultural immersion also lends itself well to teaching independence at an accelerated pace. “When it comes to moving to a new place with a new language and a new cultural environment by yourself, at some point you must develop an ability to figure things out for yourself, otherwise you won’t make it through the experience,” says Holdermann. His study found a universal increase in students’ confidence in their own problem-solving abilities at the end of their immersion.
After studying the personal impact of studying abroad and defending his thesis, Holdermann considers himself an advocate for education abroad. Being able to quantify your learning curve from beginning to end is empowering.
“At the beginning of my time in Heidelberg, I had to take a language placement exam and couldn’t even understand the instructions for the test being given to me,” Holdermann admitted. “Towards the end of my stay my grandparents came to visit me, and a woman stopped me in the street to ask for directions in German. I answered in German, telling her how to get where she was going, and rejoined my grandfather. He asked me ‘Do you know how cool it was to watch you do that?’ It was one of those moments when it really hit me how much I had learned and grown in my time abroad.”
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