The chances of death in a foreign country

| Forum Editor

If you have been reading the news for the past, say, 100 days, you know that the world is going to hell at any moment. Students have been caught in crises in Egypt and Japan, and while the U.S. government has been pretty good about getting people out, that doesn’t limit the amount of danger they were in at any one time. With this type of danger, should we really study abroad?

If you really think about it, how safe is the rest of the world? Can we truly trust that we will be safe in other countries? Unfortunately, the answer is invariably no. No matter how hard we try, no matter where we are, we will never be entirely safe. But this shouldn’t stop us from trying to gain new experiences and trying to understand the rest of the world.

If the crises in Japan and Egypt have taught us anything, it is that the situation in relatively “stable” countries can degrade so quickly that nothing we do will ever be entirely secure.

The time we spend in other places can teach us more about the world than just about anything that Washington University can offer. Even countries like the United Kingdom or Germany, nations people would normally call “safe,” have something incredibly valuable to teach us. How different is German or English culture from our own?

And I think that if something bad is going to happen in a country, you can learn more if you are there. I can only imagine being in Egypt during the revolution, or in Japan to watch a nuclear crisis unfold. I have always believed you can learn more about a culture that is under stress, and situations like those help you to understand them even better.

Besides, the dangers that have arisen in the past few months are extreme examples. It isn’t as though these are things that happen all the time, and assuming that every country you go to will have a revolution or a natural disaster is like assuming that you will be shot every time you go outside.

Moreover, the U.S. isn’t safe from danger either. It isn’t like an earthquake in San Francisco or a hurricane in New Orleans can’t happen. Natural disasters happen everywhere; going to a different part of the world isn’t going to change the constant danger you are in.

I think the important thing to remember is that we live in a world that is getting more dangerous all the time. We can see it exploding around us every day, and that isn’t going to change in the near future. So we should just learn to accept things as they are, and not let danger stop us from learning as much as we can about the rest of the world.

Every country that we can travel to has something to offer, something to teach us. Whether that be about the culture itself, or how it responds to crises isn’t important. We are students, and it is our job to learn, so if we have the opportunity to do it, we should. If things are dangerous, so be it. The benefits still outweigh the risks. When it comes down to it, I’m going to be studying abroad, because I want that experience, no matter how dangerous the country of my choice might be. And you should do the same.

Sign up for the email edition

Stay up to date with everything happening at Washington University and beyond.

Subscribe