How Travel Changes You

A Remedy for Ignorance

It is a common belief that when you’re traveling you’re learning, but how does what you learn change you?

A traveler is different than a tourist. A traveler actively seeks out new people, opportunities, and experience while a tourist only travels to sightsee. The actions can be the same but the intention behind them makes all the difference in your personal growth.

As Americans, we have a nasty bug in our society called ignorance. Many Americans lack awareness about basic world knowledge and geography and have no motivation or desire to learn. We are content living our lives thinking only about ourselves and things that relate directly to us. It’s hard for Americans to care about monsoons or the slave trade in Libya or the extinction of elephants because none of those things directly affect them.

Mitchell Lawson, a Study Abroad coordinator at Marquette University talks about some of the ways he has been changed by travel and how he has seen students change. “The professional benefits of traveling are enormous- resume build up, languages, cross-cultural communication skills, foreign markets; but more than that it opens up your curiosity about the world”. Travel also makes you comfortable with ambiguity. Not knowing the where you are, the language, how to get to a destination, and other common traveling mishaps will develop your problem-solving skills and make you more confident in yourself. Most people don’t know anything about the indigenous tribes in the Amazon, or nomadic groups in the desert, or the traditions of Italian cowboys; when you travel, it opens your eyes to so many different kinds of people and places that you never knew existed.

Lawson is adamant that even though travel will benefit anyone who partakes in it, the only way it will change you is if you want it to. “Travel is all about your intentions” Lawson says, “If you just want to go somewhere to take a nice picture for Instagram, you’re not going to learn anything about the place. You haven’t grown as a person you’ve just taken a nice picture. You have to travel with the active intention of learning about the place you’re in and experiencing the people fully. You have to be ready to challenge your own beliefs and open to being wrong about things”.

A fully immersed traveler will gain the greatest understanding of that particular place and therefore gain more and grow more than someone who spends their time hopping from place to place and doesn’t give themselves the time to fully experience the places or countries they’re in. In an article in WorldPackers, Sinead says “ I think that these moments of being immersed in a totally different culture play a key role in allowing travelers to develop a more open mind.”

Although traveling will help you learn tangible things and skills, the biggest way traveling will change you is to make you grow as a person. You become a more understanding and wholistic person when traveling is done right and the world will be better for it.

Traveling will change you as a person — if you let it.

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