Alumni have long broken out of the classroom for study abroad programs in far-flung lands, where they encounter life lessons that reverberate across years and in unexpected ways.

Many Sidwell Friends students and alumni have long viewed studying abroad as a rite of passage. Some traveled to China on a Zeidman Fellowship. Others participated in a School Year Abroad program. Many more opted to give it a go during their time in college. Sidwell Friends Magazine recently caught up with a half-dozen alumni to talk about their study abroad adventures. There was tremendous variation in the kinds of challenges they faced and nations they settled into. A lucky few were witnesses to memorable moments in history. But all of them had something in common: They were irreversibly changed by the experience.

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Language Matters

Moving overseas to study as a young person necessarily involves taking on all kinds of challenges and discomfort—some predictable, others not so much. A major one: getting used to speaking in a foreign tongue. 

“Our Russian was not that good, so we got very little from each lesson,” says Dawid Walendowski ’91, who studied in Moscow for part of his senior year at Sidwell Friends under the auspices of an exchange program overseen by a consortium of DC schools. “It was more of a huge adventure than an academic exercise. It was funny, sitting with Russian kids and listening to their physics lessons, while trying to figure out the basic words.”

Emily Paster ’92 says her French before spending her junior year of college in Paris was pretty good—she was a French major at Princeton—yet it was still difficult to “live a life in French.” She improved “exponentially” after living there a while—to the point that she could defy stereotypes. “Someone asked if I was Canadian, because they didn’t think an American could possibly speak French that well,” Paster says. “I definitely dined out on that for a long time.”

Thao Le ’89 had a unique experience picking up Mandarin while studying in Beijing for a year under a Zeidman Fellowship. In a post-Tiananmen Square world, relations between the United States and China were tense. Due to her Vietnamese heritage, Le says she consistently passed for Chinese, which helped open the door to conversations—and it made language acquisition more intense but also more effective. “The other Americans were white Americans, so they walked down the street and everyone looked at them, called them ‘ghosts’ and stuff,” Le says. “But they assumed that I was Chinese, so they would talk to me a mile a minute. At first I didn’t understand what they said because they were talking too quickly, but by the end of it, I was pretty fluent and was able to make my way around town.” 

Partway through the semester, it started to click: I started to dream in Spanish.radhika bhattacharya '99

Radhika Bhattacharya ’99 says that she hadn’t spoken a lick of Spanish since her AP Spanish exam at Sidwell Friends a few years before doing a fall semester during college in Salamanca, Spain. Yet she was able to make breakthroughs rather quickly. “Partway through the semester, it started to click: l started to dream in Spanish, started to be able to feel as if I was not an idiot when I was conversing,” Bhattacharya says. “It was really satisfying to get over that hump, and to finally feel like I can be myself, even though it’s another language.”

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Accelerated Adulting

High-speed internet makes it easy to stay in touch across international borders today: Texting apps, FaceTime, and social media allow instant connections with loved ones many time zones away. But until relatively recently, living abroad made it difficult to contact home, forcing students abroad to quickly develop newfound independence and to take bold steps into the unknown on their own.

Kiran Dhanji ’99 was incredibly excited to study at the University of Nottingham in England for her undergraduate degree—until the moment she arrived at her dorm room. “I remember closing my door and thinking, I’ve made the worst mistake of my life,” Dhanji says. “I looked out in the courtyard and thought, What have I done? Why didn’t I go to school in the States? Why am I so far from home? What made me think this would be a good idea?”

A text to her parents for reassurance wasn’t a technological option, and a call would have been expensive and required finding a payphone. But 30 minutes after her arrival, Dhanji heard a knock on the door—her fellow students invited her out to the student union bar. She made her first friends in Nottingham that very night. 

Bhattacharya described experiencing the slopes of the “W curve” during her time in Salamanca in the heart of Spain. “At first, you’re super excited, and then you go down on the curve as you start to confront longer-term cultural differences,” she says. “Then you have a rise again as you really adjust.” (The same thing happens in reverse as you return home, completing the “W.”) For example, Bhattacharya says that in Spain dining out, even for lunch, can be an hours-long affair, which can be “jarring compared with an American tempo.” But after a few months in Spain, she found herself “luxuriating in the slower pace”—only to be discombobulated again at home when confronted with a brisk American pace.

Most alumni talked about how they rang home once a week or once a month and also wrote letters more.

“I got really good at writing letters and photojournaling,” Le says of her time in Beijing. “Back then we had film, so I would take tons of pictures, and I would write on the back of them. It really made me good at writing and telling stories; having that slowness, you really have to think and be reflective.” 

Overwhelmingly, students abroad are forced to be in the present with the people they live with. Sometimes that was the other students in their dorms and classes; sometimes it was a host family, who could introduce them to new cultures in unexpected ways. 

Sophie Peikin ’19, who went to Japan through Sidwell’s Voices of Peace fellowship to learn about nuclear nonproliferation, quickly grew close to her host family in Tokyo, who were eager to teach her about their culture. “We went to a restaurant, and they said: ‘We’re gonna have raw horse. It’s a Japanese delicacy,’” says Peikin. “I was like, ‘I guess I’m gonna try it.’ It opened my worldview— and my palate—for sure.” 

Paster says her host family in Paris were practicing Sephardic Jews—a revelatory experience for a young woman raised in an “entirely secular” household. (She has an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Catholic mother, neither of whom are religious.) But Paster connected with this family—and their religiosity— deeply. “It was a truly life-changing experience,” says Paster, who is now a food writer. “I learned so much more about the Jewish diaspora by spending a year with this wonderful family, celebrating their holidays with them, learning all about their traditions, particularly their culinary traditions—because my first love is always food.” 

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Worldview Changes

Studying abroad introduces a variety of new cultures and unfamiliar routines into students’ lives. It also changes the way they think in ways big and small, both through direct encounters with new ideas and by prompting introspection about their old ones. 

Shortly after arriving at the University of Nottingham, Dhanji recalls observing that most of the students seemed to have something she didn’t, but she couldn’t put her finger on it at first. Eventually it occurred to her that, as is especially common in Europe, many had taken a gap year before college—traveling and working around the world—and it endowed them with a maturity and ease that surpassed her own. “Whatever they had done in their gap year,” Dhanji says, “these British students had all come back to university with a better understanding of themselves and a clearer sense of purpose than I had.” 

Dhanji’s hunch that a gap year would help her grow is precisely what inspired her to take one between her undergraduate degree and law school. And it was just four months into that gap year, which she took in Japan, when she realized she didn’t want to go to law school at all, and instead wanted to take a different path toward “making the world a better place and still getting to explore.” So she got a master’s degree in international relations.

There was a fable about an old man moving mountains a little bit at a time. Chinese people don't think in terms of my lifetime, but in terms of generations. And I don't know that America has that long-term view.Thao Le '89

In China, Le says she was struck by the way people there often took the long view of life. “One of the big things in Chinese culture is patience and persistence,” says Le. “There was a fable about an old man moving mountains a little bit at a time. Chinese people don’t think in terms of my lifetime, but in terms of generations. And I don’t know that America has that long-term view.”

Sometimes political and economic events can spark new outlooks and sensibilities for students abroad. Walendowski recalled being charmed by how the opening of a new McDonald’s in Moscow at the tail end of the Soviet Union was a massive cultural event. “There was a two-mile line to get a cheeseburger,” Walendowski says. “We invited some of the Russian kids to eat with us. It was kind of a sensation.” In the final throes of the Cold War, somehow the burger came to symbolize the possibility for warmer relations. “There was an openness to capitalism, and it was a very optimistic time,” Walendowski says. “These two opponents [the United States and the USSR] suddenly decided they were going to try to be friends and cooperate.”

Just months after he returned to the United States, the Soviet Union collapsed. 

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Who They Are Now

Every alum described their time abroad as changing the course of their lives. 

“Since studying abroad, not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought deeply about the things I saw or the people that I met,” Peikin says. To wit: Her high school trip to Japan inspired her, like Dhanji, to study international relations as well as Japanese. “The process of learning Japanese showed me that if I put my mind to something, I could really learn anything,” Peikin says. “I think that sense of empowerment determined the course of my life. Even when I was studying economics in college, I was like, Okay, well, if I can teach myself Japanese, then I can for sure figure out this integration question for econ. It was very applicable to different areas of my life.”

She now works at a French bank—and she’s learning French.

Sometimes breakthroughs can happen in unexpected ways. Paster was already a francophile before she arrived in Paris, but living with her Sephardic Jewish host family sparked an interest in her Jewish identity—and thereby altered the course of her life. “I thought, Wow, this was a really profound experience, but I didn’t know how it was going to play out,” Paster says. “Now, I am married to a Jewish man. We have raised our children in the Jewish faith. We belong to a synagogue. I do trace that back to that experience.”

And in her work as a food writer, she has also written about Jewish cuisine.

Walendowski says his trip to Moscow changed the way he thought about where he might belong, or at least where he might be most excited to live. He was born in Poland and moved to the United States when he was 6 years old, but he wasn’t sure where he wanted to live as an adult. “The experience in Moscow encouraged me to catch the Eastern European bug, to want to be a part of these fascinating changes that were happening in this part of the world,” Walendowski says of the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. “I’m sure that played a role in my decision to move over there years later.”

After finishing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia, Walendowski moved to Poland—and he has lived there ever since. His Russian skills are also helpful in his work as a partner at a family history research business, which he does alongside work in finance.

Le says studying abroad in college “made me really hungry to see other parts of the world.” Filled with a sense that “the world is wide and wonderful,” after graduating, she entered the Peace Corps and worked in Mali, where she made use of the French her grandfather had taught her growing up—and learned Bambara, too.

Le, who is now a 1st grade teacher, ultimately married a man who also speaks Mandarin, and they sent their kids to a Mandarin-immersion school in California. They also spent a year in Taiwan to escape the pandemic—an experience their family loved. 

Bhattacharya says that in her later work as a legal-aid attorney, representing clients who couldn’t otherwise afford a lawyer, her Spanish skills have made a profound difference. “Not having to work through an interpreter, and getting to speak to my clients directly is huge,” says Bhattacharya, who now works as a lawyer for the Department of Health and Human Services. “It really helps cultivate a relationship with them in a way that might not have been otherwise possible.”

She points out that it changed the way she views immigrants in the United States more broadly as well. “I’m even more inclined to talk with people who are living abroad in the U.S.,” she says. “I have added respect and empathy for people speaking English as a second language and am perhaps more likely to befriend those who have gone out of their comfort zones and left their home countries to live here.”

Your brain is being forced to understand and think differently and perceive differently and find completely different ways of understanding your exact same reality.kiran dhanji '99 

Dhanji observes that studying abroad allows people to learn in completely new ways—and beyond textbooks. “Your brain is being forced to understand and think differently and perceive differently and find completely different ways of understanding your exact same reality,” she says. That complex cultural matrix, in turn, has helped her with her career. “I was promoted into senior-level management positions in my 20s,” says Dhanji, who now runs a public safety and security consulting firm specializing in aviation. “I think studying abroad was the reason I was able to work very well with very large groups of people, and I was able to understand different people’s perspectives.” 

Indeed, learning in a foreign place fosters an openness to peace and stewardship—not just in one’s immediate community but around the entire world—mirroring the values of a Sidwell Friends education.