How Study Abroad Experiences Landed Me My First Job

When I decided to travel to Muscat, Oman at age 15 or spend my senior year of high school in southern Germany, I never paused to consider how my travels might impact my future resume.

I knew that my exchanges were valuable. However, that value seemed to me to be personal, perhaps academic, but certainly not professional. I assumed that I would pursue a career in some international field, and I obtained a college degree to this end. However, when navigating the Washington D.C. job market, I found the international development space overcrowded and fiercely competitive.

So rather than a human rights nonprofit or foreign affairs think tank, it was a diversity and inclusion nonprofit that agreed to interview me. My degree had nothing to do with the tasks in the job description and my study abroad experiences had no connection to the organization’s mission. And yet, when I sat down across from the CEO, her first question was, “You were how old when you went to Oman?”

Julianne and classmates in Muscat, Oman

A few days later, I was given a formal offer for a position usually requiring nearly a decade of experience.

If I had to explain why a ten-minute conversation about my semester abroad convinced a seasoned executive to take a chance on a recent college grad, I would sum it up like this: actions speak louder than words.

Every hiring manager is looking for initiative, a strong work ethic, a willingness to embrace and overcome challenge, flexibility, and reliability. And every potential employee tries to embody these qualities on their resume. But just like in good storytelling you paint a picture, on a good resume, you guide a hiring manager to making their own conclusions, rather than telling them what they should think of you.

Julianne and her German host family at Lichtenstein Castle

The woman who became my boss needed to know that I wasn’t afraid of hard experiences and that I knew how to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on to the next project. In hearing about the challenges and rewards of my five months in Oman, she concluded that I had learned these qualities through experience and could apply the lessons to my job as her Executive Assistant. She was impressed not by the standard boxes I had checked – the college diploma, club leadership, and work experience – but by something she had never seen before.

So, to the ambitious high school student who is on the fence about studying abroad, wondering how it will impact your college prospects and later career, hear me out: there are few things you can do to better prepare yourself for the workforce and create a competitive resume than to study abroad.

It will teach you how to learn with an open mind and teach with humility. It will make you question things you have always taken for granted, thus cultivating a discerning spirit in you. It will bring you face to face with failure as you bumble through the highs and lows of language learning through immersion, and it will allow you the great reward of eventually succeeding in that pursuit. It will teach you how to break outside the confines of your comfort zone and do truly amazing things.

And if my experience is any indicator, it will help you build not only a resume capable of catching the hiring manager’s eye, but the skills and qualities capable of impressing them once you land the job.

Julianne Churchill grew up hosting exchange students and then studied abroad herself as a YES Abroad scholar to Oman in 2009 and as a CBYX scholar to Germany in 2011-2012. She has a bachelor's in international politics from Patrick Henry College and currently works for the International Republican Institute in their Middle East and North Africa division.