Studying abroad: questions to ask yourself when choosing your course of study

You’ve made up your mind and are ready to study abroad?

Here’s a list of questions to help you think about what you’d like to do and define your goals. You don’t know which course to choose (veterinary medicine, liberal arts, social sciences, business…)

Your academic interests

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What subjects interest you most in high school? What are your reasons for doing so?
Are you looking for a theoretical or applied curriculum?
Would you like to follow a more general or specialized curriculum?
Is the intellectual dimension fundamental to you?

Your working environment and career

How important do you want your job or career to be in your life?
What’s your ambition?
What kind of job would you like to do?
Do you have an a priori preference for the public or private sector? Do you consider it necessary for your work to be useful to the community?
What would your ideal work environment look like? Are independence and autonomy essential values for you? Do you see yourself more as an employee or as your own boss? Would you consider working very long hours? Could you work in a high-pressure environment?
How would you describe an ideal day in your future job? Is stability a fundamental value for you? Would you be able to cope with an unpredictable schedule? Is variety in your daily routine important to you?
What kind of impact would you like to have on the world?

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Your future personal life

Would you prefer to live in an international metropolis like New York, London or Paris, or in a more human-scale city with a more leisurely pace?
How important is work-life balance to you?

Your future financial situation

Another aspect to consider when choosing your studies or career is your financial goals.
What is your vision of financial success?
Could you be satisfied or fulfilled in a job that doesn’t necessarily pay as much as others?
How much risk would you be willing to take?

Remember, there’s no one way to achieve financial success, and financial success is not necessarily synonymous with life success! These few questions can help you define your long-term goals, and taking the time to answer them will help you better understand and describe what’s important to you.

Once you have answered these questions, you can take a sheet of paper and answer the following two questions:

When you look ahead 5 or 10 years, or even further, what does your life look like?
If you could design your dream life, what would it look like?

Feel free to be creative and try to answer these questions with texts, drawings, collages… anything that might inspire you! Now that you can visualize your dream situation, what would be the first concrete steps you could take to make this dream a reality?

The answer to this question is often difficult, because in many cases, there’s no single possible path! Let’s suppose you now have a clearer vision of your dream future. Imagine yourself 20 years from now. You’ve arrived exactly where you’d hoped to be. How did you get there? What steps did you take to reach this level of success and get to where you are today? What obstacles did you have to overcome to realize your dream? Do some careers now seem more attractive than others?

Don’t hesitate to come back to these questions and reflect on them regularly!

“What I do know is that if you do work you love and the work fills you up, the rest will come.”

Oprah Winfrey

Find all the answers to your questions about studying abroad in our book “Etudier à l’étranger après le Bac” (Studyrama Editions).