Most of the content you’ll find about study abroad is written from the other side of the trip. It is full of people who went, loved it, and want you to know how much it changed them. That version of the story is true. It is also not the version that is useful when you’re sitting with a pit in your stomach three weeks before departure wondering whether you made a terrible mistake.
The nervousness is real, and it is worth addressing directly rather than burying under enthusiasm about everything you’re about to experience. If you’re nervous about studying abroad for the first time, you are not the exception. You are not uniquely unprepared; not someone who should probably just stay home. You are a student who is about to do something genuinely unfamiliar, and your nervous system is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Here is what to do with that.
Name what you’re actually nervous about
The word “nervous” covers a lot of ground, and it helps to get more specific. Students who are anxious about studying abroad tend to be anxious about a handful of distinct things that are worth naming separately, because each one has a different answer.
Being far from home for the first time. For students who have never traveled internationally, or who have never been away from their support network for more than a few days, the physical distance from everything familiar carries its own weight. This is not irrational. Being far from home is genuinely disorienting the first time, even when the experience is objectively good.
Not knowing anyone. The fear that you will show up and not connect with the other students, that everyone else will already know each other, that you will spend two weeks on the outside of a group that formed without you. This fear is particularly common among students who identify as introverted or who have had difficult social experiences in the past.
Something going wrong when you’re too far away to handle it. Losing a bag, getting sick, having a family emergency at home while you’re overseas, getting lost in a city where you don’t speak the language. The fear is not usually about any single catastrophe but about being without the familiar resources you’d normally rely on.
Wasting the money. For students who stretched to afford the program, or whose parents made real sacrifices to make it possible, there is a specific anxiety around not having a good enough time to justify the cost. The worry that you will spend a significant amount of money and come back feeling like it wasn’t worth it.
Not being the kind of person who does this. This one is the hardest to name but is often the most accurate: the underlying fear that study abroad is for a certain type of person — confident, extroverted, well-travelled — and that you might not be that person. That everyone else will seem like they belong there and you will be the one who clearly doesn’t.
If you can recognise which of these is driving your nervousness, the next step becomes clearer.
What a faculty-led program actually means when you’re anxious
Independent travel and structured program travel are completely different experiences, and most of the scenarios students imagine when they’re anxious about studying abroad are scenarios that assume you’re traveling alone.
A faculty-led program means a professor travels with your group for the entire duration of the program. Not just for the first day, not just for the company visits — for the whole trip. The accommodation is confirmed before you arrive. The company visits are scheduled in advance. Group meals are part of the program. The itinerary is set. You do not land in a foreign country and figure out where you’re going.
What this means practically is that the first morning you wake up in a hotel in London or Cape Town or Tokyo, you are not making any decisions alone. You are not navigating a city you don’t know without support. The hardest part of solo travel — the part that makes it genuinely stressful for first-time travelers — is the constant low-level cognitive load of figuring everything out by yourself. A structured program removes most of that load. You can be present in the experience rather than managing the logistics of it.
The social dimension works differently too. Every person on the program is a student at a university, most of them are on their first or second international experience, and all of them are in the same situation as you. The cohort structure means the connections are built into the format. You are not walking into a party where everyone already knows each other. You are walking into a group that is forming in real time, the same as you are.
GLO programs run 10 to 14 days. That is long enough to have a real experience and genuinely short enough to commit to even when you are anxious. It is not a semester. There is a fixed start date and a fixed end date, and then you are home.
Before you go: what actually helps
The most useful thing you can do with pre-departure nerves is channel them into preparation rather than avoidance. Anxiety tends to escalate when there is nothing to do with it. Giving it a practical outlet reduces it.
Get the logistics settled well before you leave. Passport validity, bank notification, international phone plan, offline maps downloaded. The administrative things that are easy to leave to the last minute are also the things that, if unresolved, turn into genuine stressors once you’re there. Handling them early removes a layer of worry before departure. The pre-departure checklist in the enrolled students guide covers all of these in detail.
Research the destination enough to feel familiar with it, but not so much that you’ve pre-decided how you feel about it. Looking up the neighbourhood your hotel is in, the general feel of the city, one or two things you actually want to do during free time — this gives your brain something concrete to hold onto rather than an abstract unknown. Arriving with a short mental list of things you’re curious about shifts the feeling slightly from dread to anticipation.
Talk to someone who has been on a similar program, if you can. Not the highly polished version of the experience, but the honest version — what was hard, what surprised them, what they wish they’d known. The pre-departure picture most students carry is assembled from highlight reels, which makes the experience sound both more glamorous and more uniformly positive than it actually is, and that gap between expectation and reality can make normal difficulties feel like failure. A more honest picture helps.
Tell someone at home that you’re nervous. A parent, a friend, your roommate. Not to be talked out of it and not because they can solve it, but because naming it out loud to another person tends to reduce its power. The nervousness often gets larger in the dark.
What to do with the nervousness that stays
Some of the anxiety will not resolve before you leave. This is normal and is not a sign that something is wrong or that you should reconsider going. It is a sign that you are about to do something that matters to you, which is almost always accompanied by some degree of fear.
The nervousness almost always shifts once you are there. The gap between imagining an unfamiliar experience and actually being in it is significant, and in almost every case, the reality is less frightening than the version you were carrying. The first morning in a new city is usually the hardest, and by the second or third day the unfamiliar has started to feel recognisable. The students who were strangers at the airport are people you know by dinner on the first night.
If you have a history of anxiety that significantly affects your daily functioning, it is worth talking to someone you trust — a counsellor, a therapist, a campus mental health resource — before your program, not because study abroad is inadvisable for anxious people but because having a plan for how to manage it gives you more options than hoping it resolves on its own.
What study abroad tends to do to anxiety, over the course of even a short program, is reframe it. The student who spent two weeks being nervous becomes the student who spent two weeks doing something despite being nervous. That is a different story to carry, and it is one that tends to stay.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, and it is more common than the polished study abroad content online would suggest. Most first-time international students experience some level of pre-departure anxiety, ranging from low-grade worry to genuine dread. The fact that something sounds like an opportunity does not cancel out the fact that it is also unfamiliar, which is a reliable trigger for anxiety. Naming it as normal rather than as a sign that you’re not ready is usually the more accurate framing.
Social anxiety and study abroad are not mutually exclusive. A structured, faculty-led program actually addresses many of the scenarios that social anxiety makes most difficult — you are not walking into unfamiliar social situations without context, the group cohort builds connections into the format, and the structured itinerary means there is always something happening that you don’t have to initiate. Many students who identify as introverted or socially anxious find that the group dynamic of a short-term program is more manageable than longer unstructured experiences. The GLO post on study abroad for introverts covers this in more depth.
Get specific about what you’re actually nervous about, because each type of anxiety has a different practical answer. If it’s logistics — handle the pre-departure checklist well in advance; if it’s social — remember that everyone in the cohort is in the same position as you; if it’s safety — read about the faculty-led program structure and what support is available throughout; if it’s the underlying feeling that you’re not the right kind of person for this — that one is worth sitting with, because it is usually the least accurate fear of all.
The cohort structure of a faculty-led program makes isolation significantly less likely than on independent travel. Everyone is a student, everyone is new, and the program itinerary creates shared experiences that build connection faster than most social environments. That said, not every cohort bonds equally deeply, and going in without the expectation of a life-changing friendship group tends to produce better outcomes than going in hoping for something specific. Show up, be present, take the initiative in small ways, and let the trip be what it is.
Faculty-led programs are specifically designed to make study abroad safe for first-time international travelers. A professor or program leader travels with the group for the entire duration, accommodation and itinerary are pre-arranged, and 24/7 support from GLO staff is available throughout the program. Students do not navigate foreign countries independently on a GLO program. The parent safety guide is also a useful resource for students who want to understand the full support infrastructure before they go.
Pre-departure homesickness — the anticipatory version, not the kind that sets in after you’ve arrived — is usually anxiety in disguise. The practical help is the same: get the logistics handled early, research the destination enough to have something concrete to look forward to, and tell someone you trust that you’re nervous. Once you’re there, homesickness is most manageable when you stay present in the daily experience rather than tracking how many days are left, and when you let yourself call home without treating it as evidence that you’re struggling.
For most students, yes, and faster than they expect. The nervousness tends to peak in the days immediately before departure and then shift significantly once the trip is actually underway. The first morning in a new city is usually the hardest point, and by the second or third day the unfamiliar has started to feel familiar. What usually stays is a lower-level version of the feeling — a heightened alertness that is part of being somewhere new — which is different from the anxiety of imagining it from a distance. Most students who were genuinely frightened before going describe the gap between the fear and the reality as one of the more surprising things about the experience.
Nervousness about something that matters is not a reason to not do it. It is often the clearest possible sign that you should.
If you’re ready to take the next step, the application takes about 12 minutes. Scholarship applications are still open.
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