Primrose Kitten
Spending a year apart of your degree, working and studying while volunteering overseas is a fantastic way to travel, get some experience, and make sure your CV stands out from the crowd.
A large number of different degrees come with the chance for you to study overseas and you can apply for a degree with a year abroad integrated. This opportunity gives you a fantastic experience and gives you the chance to have that little bit of an edge over people when you leave university and start to think about applying for jobs. The opportunity to spend a year abroad can be something that's integrated into your degree from the start, or it can be something that you apply for later once you start your university. If you apply for a course where it's integrated, the majority of universities will let you change your mind if you decide you do not want to go. They are not going to force you to go abroad for a year.
This can be much more varied than a sandwich course where you just go on work experience. You can go and study at a university in another country, studying the same subject that you went to university to study. You can go and volunteer in a different country, or you can go and work in a different country. Language degrees offer the most obvious example of this, but it is not just limited to languages. Businesses, sciences, medicine, law, all of these have undeniable opportunities for you to go abroad for a year to work, volunteer or study. There are loads of advantages to this, the main one being in today's global economy, and you are showing people straight out of university that you are a world traveller. That you can work with people from other cultures; that you have the experience of living and working in different places; that you can successfully integrate yourself into a new business in modern culture. These days it is rare that a company is just going to operate locally or within one country so they are looking for people that can work with people from a wide range of different countries.
