Getting ready for study abroad is not the same as getting ready for a summer vacation. Packing, planes and planning are all things you have to consider when you decide to study abroad. That’s why studying abroad is a big commitment for so many students who have not traveled on their own before.
Thankfully getting ready for study abroad isn’t something that you have to do alone! Keep reading to find out all the tips and tricks to making planning your semester abroad so much easier.
Travel
Before you tell everyone, ”bon voyage!”, make sure you booked all the right planes and organized transportation to and from the airport. This seems like a no-brainer but many times, it’s not as easy as just buying a ticket.
Airport Transfer and Air Travel
For students coming from Santa Barbara, remember that most flights will be from Los Angeles. This means that you need to arrange transportation to LAX. If nobody is able to drive you, then taking the Santa Barbara Airbus (link to SB Airbus) could be the best option. The shuttle bus usually departs from La Cumbre Plaza and goes directly to LAX and drops you off at your right terminal.
If you chose a study abroad program with a group flight, you’re in luck! Traveling with your peers and program director will be a completely different experience to traveling to a foreign country alone. To find out if you have the group flight option, visit the SBCC study abroad website and read your program page for more information.
Students flying from home or another city should take further precautions because there will be even more factors to consider and this could make it easier to make mistakes. However, traveling from your home city could be easier as it will be more familiar to you — it’s your hometown after all! This especially applies to students who are able to enlist their parents, friends and family in driving them to the airports, and international students who are flying from their home countries where things could be easier.
Taxi and Rideshare
Once you arrive, be sure to have the address to your homestay, hotel or headquarters of the study abroad program in your city because there may be a language barrier between you and the first taxi driver that you meet on your way out of the airport. Three important things to communicate with the driver are:
Destination (hotel or street name, description of area)
Method of payment (cash, card, currency)
Price*
* This one is especially important. If the cab is metered, check that it's set to zero or the base fare before the ride starts. Otherwise you could be paying the tourist price!
Using a rideshare app can save some of the headache of communicating all of the details and making sure you don't get completely lost, just verify the rideshare services available in your city. In places like Rome, Blablacar might be the only service you can use, however there are others like itTaxi that could work, it all depends on when you go abroad.
Public Transportation
Part of getting settled in the first few weeks of the study abroad is familiarizing yourself with the public transportation network. Usually a city will have a centralized transportation pass that will grant universal access to the trams, buses and subways that connect all the various parts of the town.
For example, London's Oyster Card will allow you to ride the famous double-decker buses and the tube system, and just about any public ferry that crosses the Thames. Needless to say, this is one of the most important parts of getting ready to travel abroad.
All in all, there's so much to consider when you're traveling abroad! It's reasons like this that make studying abroad a special experience because you will have support from everyone on the program to help you through the process, especially if this is your first time leaving the country. No matter what happens, someone will help you find your way.
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