“So you are a junior?”“No. Not really. I am a senior.”“Oh really? Did the people from Shanghai last year also choose to study away for all three semesters?”“Oh well you know, I am a part of the inaugural class so, to be honest, we have no one to look up to… so I would say studying away for three semesters is out of my own will. Maybe the people below us will refer to my experience later when they have to make decisions? I hope so.”Yes. After thinking about it thoroughly, I decided to study away for another semester after spending two semesters in NYC and Berlin. Now I am the only NYU Shanghai student in NYU Tel Aviv for the Fall 2016 semester. I have never regretted attending NYU Shanghai. But it was not until I studied abroad that I realized, though being in NYU Shanghai has a lot of privileges and abundant opportunities, there is still sufficient room for improvement for both the school itself and myself as an individual. Sometimes I get too carried away by the fact that I am a part of the inaugural class. I am blinded by the achievements that I have made in high school and I think being in a higher education institution located in one of the most expensive business centers on Earth is enough. All these external factors deceived me and made me believe this is it and there is no need to reach out and pursue more. But no. It is not enough. I am glad and fortunate enough for the two years in Shanghai. It allowed me to appreciate my own culture and gain a more comprehensive and global view about China as a developing country. Learning to cherish what I had in China was already a step forward but by living in a different country, I started to realize the importance of humbling myself. Because when I am facing another culture that I am not familiar with, I am well aware of the fact that I am an outsider and I should be respectful. My favorite sentence when I was a freshman was: I appreciate the cultural and social differences. But as a matter of fact, there is a huge difference between expressing an attitude and applying it to real life. I said I could appreciate differences because I was living in a homogenous environment where there are only two groups of people: Chinese and people who are trying to adapt to Chinese culture. But I have never lived in a place that is not China long enough for me to say this sentence. After studying abroad and living in a foreign environment long enough, I realized how important and difficult it is to lower myself to the bottom and to accept a new culture, to start from zero.Adapting to a new environment is hard. But it is addictive. I feel myself more and more complete every day as a human being, or to put it in a cheesy way, a global citizen, by going to different places, encountering different people and cultures. I don’t think studying abroad and traveling is a way to ‘find myself’ because there is no record telling you that you have left a piece of yourself in the middle of a desert or a Greek island. I just want to ditch the ignorance that I may have because I think a twenty-year-old should be humble and grateful. There are so many things I don’t know. So much knowledge I need to learn. And by choosing to study away for another semester while I can is something I would not regret because a city could always teach me more than what school could.This article was written by Amy Zhao. Please send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Megan Graham