Documenting Your Experience

We recommend you start your journal now (before you leave) and continue it for several months after you come back home. This way you will record the entire experience – your thoughts before you leave, your time in another culture, and your new insights after you come home. The following questions will help you in the process of exploring the implications of culture, how to be effective in another culture, and how you learn about culture. It is not necessary to write daily. However, you will profit immensely from frequent entries.

These are questions to guide you as you start to think about what you might include in your journal entries. Describe scenes, events, conversations, and your reactions to them – don’t rely on your camera for this. If you don’t journal regularly until later in your experience, you will forget to include things that, at the beginning, were so new, but after a while will seem almost ordinary.

Making scrapbooks can be a satisfying way to extend your study abroad experience a little after you return home. Later on it can also enrich or bring back memories evoked by your photographs. While abroad, collect small items you might use in a scrapbook (this list is only limited by your imagination): 

• museum ticket stubs 

• train/subway/airplane ticket stubs

• napkins from cafes 

• sugar packets from cafes 

• brochures 

• little trinkets 

• returned exams or papers

• spare change 

• stamp

Photographs are another important way to record your experiences abroad. 

• You probably are already planning to take photos of beautiful scenery or distinctive monuments. Remember to also include photos of your everyday world: 

  • • your favorite street vendor

    • your host family members

    • your room 

    • your street 

    • school cafeteria 

    • university campus 

    • your subway stop 

    • classrooms, teachers

    • your favorite cafe 

    • your favorite local market

• Include people in your photos. Make sure you are in some as well. 

• Be a sensitive cross-cultural photographer. Use your camera to create bridges and build relationships, not as a barrier, which will create hard feelings and negatively impact your subjects. 

• Though it is not always possible, spend time with people prior to taking their picture. For example, wait a few days or weeks before you take pictures of your host family & friends. It’s easier to take pictures of people once you know him. 

• If you do not know someone but wish to photograph him or her, ask permission. Taking a picture when someone is not prepared may be quite offensive. Think about how you would feel if a stranger had you in her camera sights, yet you felt unprepared, unkempt, or unsure about yourself.

• Another reason to ask permission is that in some cultures, there are places and things, which should not be photographed. Don’t learn this the hard way; simply ask first.

• Our eye and attention is automatically drawn to the unusual and the bizarre. It is natural to want to take pictures of these things, but do not limit you photographs to the strange and unusual. Every so often, evaluate what you have photographed – are you fairly representing the host country in the pictures you take? Are you only taking pictures of the “strange” food? Are you only taking pictures of slums and starving people? If you take pictures of people experiencing difficult lives, remember also to take pictures of people enjoying life. 

• Organize your collections and pictures into a book soon after you return home. This way everything will be fresh in your mind, and if you put it off, it may not ever happen. Label pictures. Include details.