What kind of student actually thrives abroad, and how to know if that's you
Most content about studying abroad is relentlessly positive. The photos are perfect. Everyone arrives, makes lifelong friends in the first week, discovers themselves, and graduates transformed. That's not wrong exactly; studying abroad genuinely is one of the most formative experiences a young person can have. But it's not the whole story. And the part that gets left out is this: some students thrive abroad in a way that exceeds anything they could have imagined, and some students have a genuinely hard time. The difference between those two groups isn't intelligence, grades, or even how much they wanted it.
It's a set of traits and habits that research has consistently identified as predictive of success, and that you can actually assess honestly in yourself before you go.
This isn't a post to scare you out of going. It's a post to help you go prepared, with a clear-eyed sense of who you are and what you might need to work on. That's more useful than a highlight reel, and more respectful of your intelligence.
What the research actually says
A study published just two months ago tracked students over a full academic year abroad, measuring their personality traits, anxiety levels, and emotional habits across nearly 4,500 individual data points. Students who spent a year abroad grew more agreeable and curious, and reported lower anxiety than peers who stayed home.
But here's the part that rarely gets quoted: four of the five major personality traits showed no meaningful difference between students who went abroad and those who stayed home. Daily emotional habits appeared more closely linked to personality change than any single dramatic cultural experience.
In other words: it's less about the fact of going abroad, and more about how you show up every ordinary day once you get there. The students who grew most weren't necessarily the boldest or the most adventurous. They were the ones with certain habits of mind that made them receptive to what the experience was offering.
As one licensed psychologist who works specifically with international students put it: "Students learn that if they can thrive under the intercultural challenges, they have the resilience for many other future situations."
So what does thriving actually require?
The traits that predict success
Curiosity: the most important one
Research consistently finds that students who go abroad exhibit higher levels of curiosity, and that this is only intensified by the new environment they're exploring, as their brains literally have to stay open to constantly learning new information to navigate the unknown.
Curiosity here doesn't mean being the person who reads every museum placard or asks questions in class (although that helps). It means a general orientation toward the unfamiliar that defaults to interest rather than discomfort. When you encounter something that doesn't work the way you expect (a bureaucratic system, a social norm, a way of teaching that's different from what you're used to) is your first instinct to find it interesting, or to find it frustrating?
Students who thrive abroad are genuinely curious about the place they've landed in. They want to understand why things work the way they do, not just learn to tolerate them.
Ask yourself honestly: When something surprises or confuses me, is my first response curiosity or irritation?
Tolerance for uncertainty
Studying abroad involves a level of not-knowing that some people find exhilarating and some people find genuinely distressing. You don't know how things work. You don't know where your people are. You don't know the social rules. You don't know if you made the right decision.
Students who struggle most are often those who need things to be resolved quickly — who find ambiguity genuinely uncomfortable and look to eliminate it as fast as possible. Students who thrive tend to have a higher threshold for sitting with "I don't know yet" and trusting that it will eventually become clear.
This doesn't mean you need to be someone who loves chaos. It means you need to be someone who can function and keep moving even when things aren't settled.
Ask yourself honestly: Can I be okay when I don't know how something is going to turn out?
The ability to ask for help
This one surprises people. It sounds like a basic life skill, not a personality trait that predicts success. But in practice, it's one of the most reliable differentiators between students who find their footing abroad and students who quietly sink.
Going abroad means not having your usual support network. It means problems come up that you've never had to solve before (housing issues, health insurance bureaucracy, academic difficulties, loneliness) and the people who could normally help you are in a different time zone. Students who thrive are the ones who can reach out to a professor, a student support service, a fellow student, or a professional when they need to. Students who struggle often have a strong instinct toward self-sufficiency that, in a foreign country without a network, becomes isolation.
Asking for help when you need it is not weakness. Abroad, it's infrastructure.
Ask yourself honestly: When I'm struggling, is my instinct to reach out or to manage alone?
A genuine reason for going
This sounds obvious, but it matters more than people expect. Students who go abroad because they want to go to that specific place, to study that specific thing, in that specific environment tend to draw on that clarity when things get hard. And things will get hard at some point. The first month is lonely for almost everyone. There are bureaucratic nightmares. There are moments of genuine homesickness.
Having a clear sense of why you chose this gives you something to return to when the motivation dips.
Students who went because it seemed impressive, or because a friend was going, or because they didn't have a better idea, often find that those aren't reasons that hold up under pressure.
Ask yourself honestly: If nobody would ever know I went abroad would I still want to go?
Willingness to feel like a beginner again
You arrive somewhere having been, in your home environment, competent. You knew how to navigate your city, your social world, your academic system. You had a sense of where you stood.
Abroad, you start from close to zero. You don't know the social dynamics. You might struggle with the language even if the program is in English. You won't understand cultural references. You'll make mistakes that feel embarrassing.
Students who thrive have a relationship with that experience of being a beginner that leans toward humility and even enjoyment rather than shame. Students who struggle often experience the loss of their previous competence as something deeply threatening to their sense of self.
Going abroad involves a temporary but real dismantling of your existing identity. The students who come out of it most transformed are the ones who could let that happen rather than fighting to maintain who they were before they left.
Ask yourself honestly: Am I okay with not knowing things? With being the person in the room who doesn't get the reference?
The traits that don't predict success as much as people think
Extraversion. The research is clear on this: extraversion showed no meaningful difference between students who thrived abroad and those who didn't. Introverts do just as well; sometimes better, because they're more comfortable with solitary time and less dependent on a large social network to feel okay.
Being "adventurous." Some of the most successful students abroad are fairly cautious people who research everything carefully and build structure deliberately. Some of the most confident and adventurous students struggle because they underestimated the emotional weight of the transition.
Having been abroad before. A holiday is completely different from building a life somewhere. Previous travel experience helps at the margins but doesn't predict how you'll handle the sustained challenge of living in another country for years.
What if you read this and felt uncertain?
Good. That's actually the right response.
The students who read a list like this and think "yes, that's definitely me on all of them" without any hesitation are sometimes the ones who haven't fully reckoned with how hard this can be. Genuine self-awareness includes recognising where you're less strong.
If you read this and thought "I'm not sure I'm great at tolerating uncertainty" or "I do tend to manage alone rather than ask for help" - that's useful information. Not a reason not to go, but a reason to go with more support in place. To know in advance which parts of this will be harder for you, and to build the scaffolding before you leave rather than scrambling for it after you arrive.
That's part of what we do at Lumen; not just the application strategy, but helping students understand what they're signing up for and making sure they're going with their eyes open and the right support around them. Including our in-house mental health specialist, whose job is exactly this: helping students navigate the parts of this that don't show up in the university brochure.
Book a free consultation — let's figure out if abroad is right for you, and how to go prepared →