Years after graduation, members of the Class of 2012 will reconvene for drinks and weddings, staying in touch via the Facebooks and LinkedIns of tomorrow. Some will bring their spouses and kids to Homecoming games, guest star at lectures or give standing ovations at Waa-Mu performances. Some may even come back and work for the university.
A total of 13,000 NU alumni are currently living and working abroad, 3,400 of whom graduated in the last five years. In recent years, the number of alumni abroad has increased rapidly, especially in Asia, according to Aspasia Apostolakis Miller, director of students, young alumni and career services at the John Evans Alumni Center.
Despite the anchoring nostalgia for their alma mater, alumni are increasingly locking their belongings in storage, confronting cultural and language barriers and purchasing one-way tickets to new homes overseas.
Temporary travel
Many NU students stay in the U.S. to spend a couple of years with Teach for America, but the qualifications and application process for teaching in China are far less rigorous and competitive. If you have a four-year degree and speak English fluently, you’ve got a shot.
When the domestic job market wasn’t yielding favorable results for Daniel Andreeff (WCAS ‘11), he started to expand his scope. He had studied abroad at Oxford, but he wanted to encounter challenges an English-speaking country couldn’t provide. So, he applied for an English teaching program in China.
“I felt like if I was ever going to take a leap of faith and move to a country I had never visited and didn’t speak the language, right after graduation would probably be the best time,” Andreeff says. “I felt like I would probably never be as open to completely new experiences or as able to pursue them ever again.”
Andreeff was sitting in Evanston’s Unicorn Cafe with friends when he got a call from his teaching program, Princeton in Asia. In that moment, he went from clueless to certain about his post-graduation plans. Despite his limited knowledge of Mandarin and obligation to travel 7,000 miles away from home, Andreeff says he didn’t hesitate. He was excited to do something “adventurous” after graduation.
Andreeff now teaches international relations theory and foreign policy to seniors and English to freshmen at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, and he says he views teaching abroad as something challenging to do in the interim. He says he thinks this experience will inform him in any work he does in the future.
Lindsey Henrikson, another Weinberg 2011 graduate, also teaches in China and is considering law school among future plans. After studying abroad in both Spain and Scotland during her Northwestern career, she decided to head to the Chinese village of Hechuan to teach English at the Pass College Chong Qing Technology and Business University.
In rural Hechuan, both Henrikson’s apartment and school have limited electricity and no heat. Often, there are more students than chairs in her classroom. She devised her curriculum from scratch, and her administrators at her school have yet to sit in on one of her classes. However, her salary is more than double that of the Chinese teachers at her school. Although it converts to very little in U.S. dollars, with her $15 per week food budget, she says she eats at the nicest restaurants in town.
Henrikson’s students, all just two years younger than she is, have shown her around China’s numerous big cities and invited her into their homes. But without the “American bubble” support system that watched over her while she studied abroad, she says she has had to learn to be independent while adjusting to a new environment alone.
“My experience proves that you don’t have to go get a nine-to-five office job right away,” Henrikson says. “Instead, I’m learning about myself and learning about the world.”
In the fall, she will head back to the States for law school, not forgetting the lessons she has learned, which she says in some ways have been more enriching than those she learned during her four years at Northwestern.
“As much as I love to travel, this was always intended to be temporary,” Henrikson says.
Going the Distance
Unlike Andreeff and Henrikson, many alumni wait and work for a few years before establishing their goals and making the move to a foreign country. Laura Ginsberg, who graduated from Northwestern with an education degree in 2004, decided three and a half years later that her plans were broader than teaching in the United States. She didn’t just want to teach or continue doing educational consulting — she wanted to learn.
“I had always wanted to learn to speak Spanish and get to know another culture on a deeper level than just a tourist,” says Ginsberg, who travelled extensively while growing up and always dreamt of living abroad. “At that point, everything was replaceable, and what wasn’t replaceable was the opportunity to move somewhere.”
In 2007, Ginsberg flew to Buenos Aires with a friend. She started to learn Spanish, and after a year when her friend left, she stayed. Ginsberg eventually applied for and landed a job at UVCMS, an e-learning company. She worked there for three years as a senior project manager before being hired at Loom, Inc. in April 2010 as the director of course development. Now 30, she says she has no regrets about her decision to pursue a nonconventional career path.
“In the States there’s this feeling that there’s a set way to do things and a set timing. I think it’s perceived as avoidant rather than looking at all the growth that happens when you live somewhere else,” Ginsberg says. “I just felt like while I was inclined to follow that cultural or societal mentality, I also knew that I wanted to do something different.”
The transition has not been easy, however. Ginsberg says that Argentina is filled with “nuances” that she is unaccustomed to, and that she had to learn the language before she could start to understand the culture. There are also elements of “professional culture” that differ from her U.S. standards; she says that her co-workers express no guilt leaving their desks at 5:59 p.m. when workdays end at 6, whereas in the U.S., employees may feel obligated to stay late or take work home with them. At the same time, her co-workers have become some of her closest friends, along with fellow expatriates.
“They have made me challenge my own thinking and my own habits and truths that I thought were universal,” Ginsberg says.
Despite her established community, Ginsberg says she plans to move back to the U.S. one day to be closer to her family. But across the Atlantic, 2003 grad Charlotte Bonham-Carter has lived in London for seven years — long enough to consider the city her home.
“I think I’ll be here forever,” Bonham-Carter says. “I married an English citizen, and we have a house and cats, so I’d say my life is pretty settled here.”
For Bonham-Carter, the decision to move to England was spontaneous, and initially, not meant to be permanent. After graduating from Northwestern, she worked at a Chicago arts organization for a year and a half. But despite the fun she had in college and the year afterwards, she grew bored of always hanging out with the same people and going to the same bars. “I just wanted to close that chapter in my life,” she says.
Upon her acceptance to a master’s curatorial program in San Francisco, she thought the next chapter had begun. But during a tour of the school, she learned that the program was actually modeled on one at the Royal College of Art in London. On a whim, she applied and got in. Two years later, she “didn’t feel like” moving back home.
“When I moved over, I think I thought I was going to move back to Chicago after the two years, and I remember kind of thinking, should I just put my stuff in Chicago in storage for a couple years, because I’ll be back?” Bonham-Carter says. “And then I maybe, deep down inside, knew that it wasn’t necessarily going to happen.”
Even though London is the ideal location for aspiring curators, finding a permanent, paid position proved to be difficult, especially one in a museum as opposed to a commercial gallery. She signed a one-year contract at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, filling in for a woman on maternity leave. After that, she filled two more year-long maternity covers in London. The third time, the woman never returned, and Bonham-Carter took her place.
“I think that it’s good advice to go for those opportunities,” Bonham-Carter says. “You can get a better job than if you look for a permanent position from the start.“
Bonham-Carter admits that she envisions herself moving back to the States for a year or two, just to “touch base,” and she says she realizes that not everyone will connect to a new city like she has. Her advice for those individuals is to go away anyway in order to gain new insights into life.
“Experience in a city like London, where there are so many opportunities, is likely to further your career wherever you end up,” Bonham-Carter says.
Ready, Set, Goals
Christina Siders, senior career counselor at University Career Services (UCS), says she sees several students each year who are interested in positions abroad. She works with both undergraduate and graduate students, helping them clarify their career goals.
“I can probably count on one hand the number of students that have been opposed to the idea of working abroad,” Siders says. She says she has noticed this willingness to explore new parts of the world in conjunction with an increase in students who already have international experience on their resumes from high school. From volunteer or religious trips to exchange programs, Siders says “students come in with a higher level of comfort living in another place outside of their home country, and as a result, want to continue to expose themselves to new ideas and new cultures.”
Siders’ counseling is personalized, yet it involves some distinct steps, the first being a bit of a reality check for some.
“I would say, first and foremost, the student needs to recognize that it’s a time-intensive and sometimes more challenging search,” Siders says. “Then, I ask them what their goal is for the next few years. Maybe they just want to travel, but maybe not immerse themselves in a new country.”
Ginsberg also emphasized the importance of goal-setting prior to making any drastic decisions to move abroad.
“I think if you don’t have a set purpose, you flounder,” Ginsberg says. “I always knew that at the end of the day my purpose here was to learn Spanish fluently and learn the Argentine culture. It was a personal rather than a professional objective.”
Siders also encourages students who are serious about moving to a foreign country to join alumni networks, available to Northwestern graduates in cities all over the world. Bonham- Carter says she has become involved with and built relationships out of the groups in London.
“You end up hanging out with these people even though you don’t know them that well, because you’re in the same city, and that’s quite nice,” Bonham-Carter says. “Northwestern alumni are always around the world, so it’s not like you’re always going to be the only person who’s in that city.
However far away, maybe the unofficial maxim really is true:
“You can leave Evanston, but Evanston never leaves you.”