While coming home may seem like a straightforward process, it actually involves some re-adjustment and lots of learning. In many ways, the process is similar to the cultural adjustment you probably experienced when you first went abroad; but re-adjusting to home may feel even stranger because we generally don't expect to have to re-adjust to familiar surroundings.

A “new you”

During your time abroad, you undoubtedly changed and grew in a variety of ways, both personally and intellectually. Coming home involves figuring out how to integrate the parts of you that are new into your old life.

Learning from home

Much of the learning from your study abroad experience will occur from this point on, as your experience "sinks in" and you have the necessary distance and time to reflect on all that has happened to you in the last semester or year.

Tools for making the adjustment: Reverse culture shock and re-entry strategies 

"The mark of successful sojourners is not that they have finally come to appreciate fully the true meaning of home, or that they may have relinquished one home for another more suited to them, but that they have found two places where they can go out and in."
- T.J. Lewis and R.E. Jungmar