Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Advertisements
Advertisements

Adventure Abroad

Two summers ago, University of Wisconsin senior Melody Saeman was craving a travel adventure. But she also needed some cash flow. After a bit of research, she discovered a compromise. A few weeks of whirlwind preparations later, she found herself far away in England, working in a cozy pub on the outskirts of London.

“I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m going to go;’ and I got my work permit about a week before I left,” Saeman said. “I had no idea of a job and just enough money in case of emergencies. It was kind of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants trip.”

After finding her low-paying pub job and then quitting because of an insulting manager, Saeman and a new Australian friend relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, where they landed positions hawking ice cream at an August festival. Later, she took in a bit of the European mainland and then hopped on a plane headed back to America — after missing her first flight home.

Saeman said combining work and travel is more rewarding than a casual tour.

“I got to live there and experience the culture every day,” she said. “When I was in high school I went on a two-week tour, and we saw all the beautiful sights and tasted all the food; but you didn’t get a feel for the culture.”

For students seeking similar adventure and cultural immersion, working or interning abroad can present a perfect opportunity — but it can also present formidable risks. The process is rarely easy, and the first major hurdle is often obtaining a work visa. Many countries frown upon foreigners coming in and snapping up jobs that could be done by native workers.

When a Swedish power management corporation offered UW senior Amanda Nelson a summer internship, she applied for a visa right away. Nevertheless, the night before she was scheduled to leave, the Swedish consulate mailed her some bad news.

“I was denied a visa because you have to prove that no Nordic citizen can do the same job,” she said. “I ended up doing the internship for credit and going without the visa.”

To prevent this sort of mishap, Nelson recommended using exchange organizations that provide limited work visas for a fee.

“I should have gone through one of the organizations that help you get a visa,” she said. “If I had had them in my corner, I would have been able to work there.”

A helping hand

Two large work/travel programs the Wisconsin Union Travel Center recommends are BUNAC Work in Britain and the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). For fees ranging from about $250 to $475, these programs will arrange visas valid for up to six months in countries including Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, France, Germany and Canada. Upon arrival, the program offers services like job listings and social events, but past participants warn that the support is minimal.

“Know that pretty much all you get is the visa,” BUNAC participant and UW senior Maayan Silver said. “Don’t rely on BUNAC. It gets you there, and then it’s what you make of it. I was expecting more support.”

Before she arrived, Silver had lined up a position in Oxford, England, working in a bookstore. Unfortunately, the job wasn’t what she had in mind.

“They had me working in the basement and never seeing people,” she said. “I was like, ‘Forget it, this is not a vacation.'”

Two weeks later, Silver quit and headed for London to look for different work. She characterized the BUNAC Center as “not so helpful” and, after an unsuccessful search, ended up leaving for France and then home.

Although Silver’s experience was not ideal, other BUNAC participants praised the organization.

UW junior Chris Darragh spent the summer of 2001 in London and Bournemouth, England, interning with a corporation called Trammel and Crow. He said he recommends BUNAC because it made getting the correct paperwork “just so easy.”

“I just wanted to go abroad for a summer where I could do some traveling, have fun and do some work at the same time,” he said. “The best thing about going with BUNAC is you get to work. It’s expensive, but if you’re making British pounds it doesn’t seem like you’re spending so much money. All in all, I was able to break even as far as plane tickets and what I was making.”

While exchange organizations may not hold participants’ hands during their job search, UW graduate student Sachi Komai said the visa she obtained through CIEE was invaluable during her experience working as a secretary in a Christchurch, New Zealand, business school.

“When I signed up with the temp agency they said right away, ‘Let’s see your visa,'” she said. “There’s no way I could have gotten that quality of job without it.”

Throughout her housing and job search, Komai stayed in a hostel. She recommends a period of hostel living for foreign job hunters.

“I was surrounded by Australians, Canadians and Brits who were all looking for work,” she said. “It helped so we could all look together. After about a week, I remember it was on a Friday night, I got two phone calls — the first one was for a job the temp agency had lined up and the second one was for an apartment.”

Although Komai lucked out right away, she encountered a small crisis after her first temp gig ended.

“There was about a month there that I was desperately searching for a job,” she said. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do, and my savings were kind of dwindling.”

She recommended bringing extra cash to cover jobless periods and warned that working abroad requires grit.

“Some people just think it’s an easy matter of, ‘Oh, I want to go work in Australia, or wherever,'” Komai said. “But you have to be very determined. You might have to go through kind of a struggle and a little uncertainty; you have to be prepared for that.”

For a little more certainty, prospective travel workers can try AISEC, a student organization in the business school that matches students with jobs in one of the 84 countries with AISEC chapters. For a $45 fee, AISEC enters participants into a database full of positions and attempts to match students’ qualifications to available jobs.

“There’s no guarantee that we can match you,” AISEC-Madison president Meggan Edlhuber said. “About 50 people will apply and some will get matched and some won’t. It’s easy to match someone who is flexible, but we get a lot of people who want to only go to one country and that’s really hard.”

Once ensured a position, an extra $450 payment guarantees participants help with all relevant paperwork, assistance finding housing and an assured salary of at least 2,200 American dollars a month, Edlhuber said. However, most jobs in the database are limited to business positions or teaching English, and non-business majors may have trouble finding jobs through AISEC, she said.

Advertisements

Required experience

While many students choose to work abroad for purely personal reasons, UW international-business majors cannot graduate without getting foreign internship experience. Many students work for credit instead of cash; unpaid interns can often get scholarships to cover living expenses.

“It’s required for international-business majors because it gives great practical work experience abroad as well as insight into the local work culture,” School of Business associate director of international programming Andrea Poehling said.

International-business major Chris Smith combined study and work in Seville, Spain, last semester. He said he used an internship fair set up by CIEE to find his internship at a small consulting firm run by two Italian lawyers. Their style of business was unfamiliar to Smith.

“Spanish culture is much more focused on smaller enterprises and family-owned businesses,” he said. “You go to work at 10, take a break from 2 until 4 and then go back to work until 7. You’re always at a bar, having a drink with someone. Time isn’t money.”

Also working in a relaxed Spanish business environment, international-business major Jane Gasperian interned at a small, one-woman-owned business in Seville. Gasperian said her boss found punctuality surprising.

“They would be in shock that I was always punctual,” she said. “They just thought it was amazing.”

Although impressed by American-style punctuality, Gasperian said the Spanish people she encountered often held very negative stereotypes about Americans.

“It’s not like people hated Americans; they just criticized them a lot . . . for being fat, not dressing nicely or not spending money wisely,” she said.

However, Gasperian said anti-Americanism and the current war on terror would not stop her from working abroad again.

“After Sept. 11, a lot of people were dropping out,” she said. “It seemed really silly to me; if anything, I would be safer outside the U.S. It was a really incredible experience. I wouldn’t exchange it for anything.”

Whether working simply for the experience or to fulfill UW requirements, students said they would never forget their time abroad.

“I have all these pictures of New Zealand and I keep thinking that that was like heaven for me,” Komai said. “I’m always going to be trying to get back to that time.”

Advertisements
Leave a Comment
Donate to The Badger Herald

Your donation will support the student journalists of University of Wisconsin-Madison. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment and cover our annual website hosting costs.

More to Discover
Donate to The Badger Herald

Comments (0)

All The Badger Herald Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *