Returning home should be a joyous experience. Your family and friends will celebrate your return. You can once again enjoy the day-to-day things that are so important to your fundamental sense of who you are. The language, both spoken and unspoken, will be familiar and the behavior of people around you, whether at home or at work or in the market place, no longer will require interpretation. You are, after all, going home.

Yet, returning home can be more difficult than going to a new place. When students come to the United States they expect things to be different; they expect to miss their families and friends; they know they will have many new challenging and confusing experiences. When preparing to go home, however, students may not anticipate how much things have changed in their absence or, equally important, how much they have changed. Students typically report that they are surprised by how difficult their re-entry into their home environment is and that they wish they had prepared themselves for it. As with any experience, the more you know about what to expect, the easier it is to cope. Knowing that your feelings are normal, that others who have returned after a sojourn abroad have had the same difficulties, can make readjustment easier.

You have made deep and subtle adjustments to the culture of the United States. Your lifestyle has changed. No matter how hard you worked at preserving your traditional ways of doing things, you have adopted certain new practices in the U.S. Even little things, like the way the telephones work and the way people greet you on the street or in class, have become part of your unconscious. Many students find that living on their own schedule, making their own decisions, and living with American roommates has had a profound effect on their views of the world and their expectations of what life should provide.

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