Social life abroad

A semester abroad is the perfect format, sitting exactly between a vacation and a relocation.

If you went away for just a couple of weeks, you would live it with a completely different mindset: you know you are a guest, you know exactly when it ends, and you are not really building a life there, you are just a visitor. If you relocated somewhere for good, you would also live it completely differently: you would arrive already thinking in years, building the kind of long-term stability that makes you far more cautious and far less spontaneous.

A semester, four to six months, on Erasmus or as a free mover, sits in neither category, and that is exactly what makes it so special. It is long enough to actually live as a local: cook your own meals, get a library card, learn which bus is late on Sundays. It is short enough to never fully settle into a routine either: it really blends the best of both worlds.

There is also a very practical reason this window exists, and honestly, it will not exist forever. Right now, you are probably young, still in your prime, not yet rooted anywhere. You most likely do not have a family to support, or a partner tied to a particular place, or anything really keeping you stuck where you were born at this age. You are free to move, to go abroad for a few months, without overthinking it too much and without needing to answer to anybody. Once you start working, this window closes. You can still take vacations, sure, and you should, but it is not the same thing as an Erasmus or free mover semester you should have done earlier and you could now regret for life. I don’t want to be tragic, but this could happen.

This is the part I find the most fascinating, and I am not joking when I say it: during your semester abroad, you will be born again as a new person.

Back in your hometown, you are living off an inertia that was assigned to you, a long time ago, by your entire social circle. You are not noticing it, most of the time, because it is so subtle. But it is also so profound that you do not really see it until you leave. You are, without realizing it, acting as the person your friends and family are used to seeing, the version of you that was fixed years ago.

Abroad, you do not carry that weight. If you try to settle your life somewhere far from home, you discover you do not have that burden, that prejudice, that inertia, anymore. You can reinvent yourself as a different person without much friction, because people are not judging you based on your past. This can happen even if you are not actively seeking it. In my own experience, I did not go looking for this. I discovered it happening to me: people were judging me for who I was in that exact moment, as if I had been born the day I arrived in my new city as a free mover student. That is refreshing, because you are judged for who you are at the time of your semester abroad, not who you used to be. This is transformative. It makes you grow so much, and learn so much about yourself since you never saw yourself from that angle you are now experiencing as a study abroad student.

You can also try things out socially that you would never try at home. To be clear, I am not talking about anything illegal or harmful to anyone else, that is not the point here. I am talking about the things you were always curious about but never had the guts to try at home, maybe because you were worried it would not fit the reputation you already had, or the way people already saw you. Abroad you can be whoever you want to be, as you do not have the same people judging you over and over. Nobody is talking about this enough, in my opinion, but I felt it so much, and I have seen other people go through exactly the same transformation. Free yourself from yourself!

It makes no difference if you go abroad with the Erasmus program or as a free mover. Everyone else in your building, your classes, and your student association doesn’t care about your student status. Free movers and Erasmus students enjoy the same social life. Erasmus Student Network is a prime resource of events in your local area. If you are lucky enough to have one in your study abroad city, please join them, as they organize fabulous stuff all semester long.

That said, yes, everyone around you is starting from zero, too, no matter the program they’re enrolled into. Nobody has a hometown friend group to retreat to. That shared starting point removes most of the usual friction of meeting new people, and it is one reason free movers end up just as socially connected as Erasmus students.

Most of your friendships at home happened by proximity: the same school, the same street, the same friend group since you were twelve. Abroad, you meet a genuinely large number of people in a short time, which means you can actually select who you spend your time with, rather than defaulting to whoever happened to be around. The friendships that survive this filtering tend to be unusually strong, precisely because they were chosen rather than inherited.

For a lot of students, this semester is also the first time living without family nearby: grocery shopping, cooking, keeping a room in some kind of order. It is clumsy at first, and often funny in hindsight, the kind of story you only appreciate once you are no longer living it. It is also a small, real taste of independence that most people do not get until much later, and it tends to make you noticeably more self-sufficient by the time you fly home.

Then there is the part about meeting new people, which, in my opinion, is one of the best things that can happen to you during this experience. This is personal, of course, maybe it does not apply to everyone. Maybe you do not want to meet new people, maybe you are scared, or maybe you never really tried it because you have stuck with the same hometown friends for so long that you forgot how exciting and refreshing meeting someone new actually feels.

I genuinely believe that, nowadays, people are not meeting new people in a healthy way anymore. We are social animals, we need to engage with other human beings, and doing so brings a huge amount of joy. You can have a lot of friends online, sure, but it is really not the same thing. Meeting someone randomly, in person, is a huge rush of adrenaline and joy, and this happens constantly during an Erasmus or free mover semester.

The social setting abroad is close to perfect. Everyone around you is roughly your age, everyone is a university student, everyone is international, and everyone is there to meet new people, because everyone is, in some sense, alone in the same way you are. This should never feel scary. It should feel like a huge opportunity. You are pretty much forced into this kind of socializing, but it is a healthy push, and the effort required to actually know people is so low compared to back home that you will be surprised by how rewarding it is. Once you have lived it, you can even bring the lesson home: forcing yourself to meet more new people, wherever you are, tends to bring you a lot of joy, and it is something you can carry with you for the rest of your life.

Another part of this experience, one that is easy to underestimate, is simply trying to survive on your own for the first time. Maybe this does not apply to you, maybe you already live alone back home, but for a lot of students, this semester is the very first time living by themselves.

I still remember the first times doing groceries and cooking for myself in my own student room in Toulouse. Maybe this is a bit of an Italian stereotype, but back home I was simply not used to doing any of that. Mom did that. It is genuinely refreshing, even from the first goofy attempts of trying to live an adult life in a new home far away from home. This is real practical training. And of course you will need to learn it either way sooner or later even if you stay in your hometown, but as a study abroad semester student this is so special since the setting is so special.

And because everyone around you is going through the exact same thing, this whole period becomes a micro-environment where everybody is learning to survive by themselves, together. Everyone is so welcoming. You go to other people’s places, they come to yours, and engaging with new people becomes easy, genuinely easy, in a way that is hard to describe if you have not lived it. Your house (or room, let’s be honest), becomes the centerpiece of your study abroad experience. And you are also lucky to experience your friends’ places, learning a lot about housekeeping in such a short timeframe.

Time is relative, as Albert Einstein famously said, though obviously I do not mean that in a physics sense, more as a matter of perception. And I swear, this is true. You can genuinely stretch out time.

Think about how a vacation feels. The first days of any trip are long, really long, if you have ever noticed that. The last days, especially on a longer trip, fly by. If you spend two weeks at the same resort, the first days feel endless because everything is new, but by the last five days, once you are doing the same thing at the same time every day, eating the same food, going to the same beach, those last days start to blur together and feel like one or two days instead of five. If a vacation is short, it can even feel long, purely because you are constantly learning something new.

The same logic applies to life in general. If you are living the exact same routine every week back home, going to work, coming back, over and over, you can wake up twenty years later and feel like it only took five. A repetitive life gets punished by time. A semester abroad is the opposite of repetitive. You are doing new things constantly: exploring a new place, living with new people, in a new academic setting, learning to live by yourself, in a new house. Life changes so much that time itself seems to slow down.

My own semester abroad felt incredibly long, in the best way. I came back home, and the strange part was that back home, nothing had changed in those four or five months, because nothing about my routine there had changed either. It genuinely felt like something out of Interstellar, except in reverse: I had lived through what felt like a very long stretch of time, while everything at home stayed exactly as I had left it.

I think we get too focused on the academic side of a degree, and do not get me wrong, studying hard matters, you should absolutely stay serious about that. But I feel that the social side, the soft skills, the interpersonal side of things, gets neglected by universities, or at best is only trained inside a controlled classroom environment. Abroad, you are living it for real, and that changes everything.

These soft skills, interpersonal communication, comfort with strangers, comfort with discomfort itself, develop so fast, in such a steep way, that you genuinely grow into a new person. I came back home far more confident than when I left. I am not exaggerating when I say this changed me. I developed a real lack of fear about talking to other people, speaking in public, throwing myself into uncomfortable situations, because I realized that your own mind is usually far more pessimistic than reality. Something shifts, and you become far more willing to just try things.

And honestly, the exam you aced during university stops mattering the moment you become an adult. The experience of studying abroad does not. It stays with you, and it keeps helping you, every single day.

Some people genuinely feel homesick. Some people are simply not built for this kind of experience, they prefer a slower, steadier environment, with the same people around them, and there is nothing wrong with that either. But if you have this curiosity, this pull to explore the world, you are very likely the right person to enjoy this fully. Nobody is forcing you to go abroad for a semester. Some universities do make it a requirement, and honestly, if you really do not want to go, that policy is not doing you any favors. But if you are curious, this is going to be genuinely good for you.

Then, of course, not every day is a fairy tale. You will have tough days where you need to study but also want to go out. You might skip a class here and there. You might not be disciplined enough (and many times the social setting around you is not exactly encouraging discipline). That said, there is something concrete you can shift, how you approach people, how much effort you put in. Meeting people during a university semester abroad is genuinely easier than in any other setting in life, so please, actually try.

Language can also isolate you a bit, though you will usually find a huge international community around you either way. If homesickness or loneliness still lingers, it really depends on you and on the destination you choose, and every destination on this platform has been vetted by us, because we would want to live there ourselves too. Still, please make the effort to learn the local language and connect with locals as well, not just with other international students, because that matters too.

Overall, I see far more positives than negatives here. You get to travel a lot, you get to know people from all over the world, and yes, someone might end up disappointed with their semester abroad, but I genuinely believe those people are a small minority. It can be exhausting sometimes, keeping up with people, keeping up with everything going on, but it is so rewarding.

If some days are not going the way you hoped, be patient with yourself. You are free to adjust the way you approach it many times: how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you study, how you socialize. This is the beauty of a semester abroad. You have so many options to shape it into what you need it to be.

This is genuinely why we started wearefreemovers in the first place. I wanted to share this with you directly, because I believe in it that much.

So if you are reading this and you are even a little curious, I think you are probably the right person for this. Do not settle. Do not think you have already squeezed enough out of your semester abroad. Every single day can bring you a new joy, a new opportunity, so live it as fully as you possibly can, right until the very last day.

In my opinion, honestly, this is one of the best semesters you will ever get to live. I am not joking. It really is that good.

And of course, if you are a prospective free mover, start your experience abroad with wearefreemovers!