Breaking Back In

While Gayatri S. Datar ’07-’08 was in India visiting family in December 2004, the tsunami hit South Asia. It ultimately killed almost 170,000 people and left thousands more without homes. When Datar returned to Harvard shortly after, she says she no longer felt as though she belonged. So she took time off and headed back to India to aid relief efforts. For four months, she lived on the floor of a training center for a local non-profit and spent up to 16 hours a day cranking out grant proposals.

Since she’s returned this past fall, she has realized that her experience has affected her in ways she couldn’t have imagined. Like most Harvard students, her peers continue to be caught up with p-sets, I-banking, facebook.com, and Stein Club, oblivious to the world outside the Crimson bubble. But Datar’s separation from this world has caused her to re-evaluate her values and priorities.

Datar is one of hundreds of students who spent time abroad in the last year. As with many of them, her experiences have proved valuable, but the transition back into undergraduate life hasn’t necessarily been easy. After months spent in another country, many students find themselves with a new mindset and a new set of values, perhaps in stark contrast to those of their college friends. Leaving the Harvard bubble can be easy enough, but re-entrance may prove more difficult.

An Unwelcome Shift

This fall, Datar returned to Harvard after months working in Cuddalore, a town in India. She says she believed passionately that anyone with a Harvard education or English skills could make a difference and was disheartened by the apparent selfishness of many of her fellow students. She says she felt like an outsider.

She wasn’t the only one affected by her travels. Liz K. Panarelli ’07 came back to Harvard in January after teaching in Tanzania, living for four months on variations of beans and corn. As she sits in the Eliot Dining Hall, deliberately eating first a bowl of lentil soup, then a small plate of succotash, one might wonder if she has grown accustomed to this type of food.

The difficulty of returning to Harvard surprises students, who expect—and are expected—to fit right back into the undergraduate lifestyle. Harvard is known for its rapid pace, as overachieving students fill their lives with extracurricular activities on top of the requisite schoolwork. “I had grown really comfortable with my life in Tanzania,” says Panarelli. “I definitely felt overwhelmed just by the speed and general busyness of everything and everyone here.”

A Change in Mindset

Although Datar and Panarelli’s experiences differ from those of most students abroad, the transition can be difficult for anyone. Even students who spent time in modern cities and large universities noticed a key difference from Harvard.

After spending the fall semester in Paris, Amanda M. Gann ’06 says she felt a transformation in how she viewed time management. “At Harvard, people overextend themselves and I was sort of the worst culprit of that before I left,” says Gann, who studied at La Sorbonne.

What separates Panarelli’s and Datar’s experiences from students like Gann’s is perhaps the tremendous difference in lifestyle between urban cities like Paris and poverty-stricken countries like Tanzania. For Panarelli, the lack of technology in Tanzania was both an obstacle and a learning experience. While grateful for the lack of modernization which helped her place more value on material comfort, by the end, she missed the convenience of hot water and electricity.

In Datar’s everyday life in India, she came into contact with many people in heartbreaking situations: orphans searching for their parents after the storm, pregnant women unable to locate the rest of their families. Through these experiences, Datar adopted a new set of values. “I realized that my entire life I’d been taking so much for granted,” she says. “I have this newfound respect for humanity in general.” Having observed people with intense and painful problems makes it difficult for Datar to identify with her peers’ stress over what she now views as petty, she says.

A Common Problem?

The alienation of returning to Harvard is widespread enough that the Office of International Programs (OIP) provides support for students on its website. “Re-entry can for some people be more difficult than the culture shock that they experienced when they went abroad. People returning from abroad can feel disoriented and startled by their perceptions of their own culture,” the website reads. The growth and development that occur as a result of studying abroad can often lead students to feel estranged from their peers.

In addition to meeting with a counselor at the OIP, returning students can take a workshop offered by the Bureau of Study Council. “Returning from Abroad: When a new person returns to an old world” encourages students to discuss their problems with each other.

Although many students may find coming back difficult, most regain their footing fairly quickly, according to Lauren Oliver, a counselor at the OIP. While difficulties are to be expected upon returning, every student interviewed thoroughly enjoyed his or her time abroad and encouraged others to go. “If you have any yearning to go abroad, and even if you don’t, just go,” Datar says.

A Step Forward

Inspired by her experiences abroad, Datar recently wrote a monologue for “Loss of Innocence,” a series of pieces presented by the South Asian Women’s Collective to benefit earthquake relief. On the stage of the Leverett Old Library, she asks the audience to imagine “traveling to a realm that is completely separate from what you know. Imagine that nobody understands you, but that’s not as big of a problem as the fact that you don’t even understand yourself. Nothing is familiar to you, nothing seems to make sense. The scene that I’m describing isn’t India.... This is me, stepping back into what I’ll call the Harvard Bubble, while leaving most of my heart outside of it.”

Next, she calls out her peers, urging them to take a stand and make a difference. She says she can no longer stomach the priorities of many students, who value money more than social good. The room is quiet.

Three days after her performance, Datar reflects on her audience’s mixed reaction. Although she worries about making enemies along the way, her courage to speak up may cause many students to rethink what they once held to be true. “Just thinking about how much there is to be done, how much can be done and isn’t getting done, frustrates me so much,” she says. Datar hopes that she can get people to see outside the Harvard bubble. Maybe she can even pop it.