Pre Departure Programs

Question: Discuss about thePre Departure Programs. Answer: Pre-Departure Programs and their Overall Impact Pre-departure programs are the events that are focused on preparing the students for who are selected into the study programs in foreign countries. These programs provide the valuable information to the students during their sessions, which will help the students in managing their lives in foreign countries. Information related to culture differences, medical and money issues, visas, plane tickets, etc are being imparted to the students in the predeparture programs. The pre-departure program helps in providing the opportunity to the students for receiving accurate, as well as, realistic information prior to their beginning of study programs (Wallace and Webb, 2014). The objective of the pre-departure program is to develop the skills in the students that will help them to adjust and cope up with any kind of challenges in a successful manner. However, it is believed that for succeeding in these pre-departure programs, students have to adjust to their personal lives and have to give up several aspects of their life. As pre-departure programs are focused on developing the understanding of different cultural, social, as well as, intellectual experiences that the students will experience in the foreign country. These programs are too vast and different from the personal beliefs, culture, values, as well as, attitudes that the student finds it difficult to manage these programs in their daily life (Herbst de Cortina et al., 2016). As a result, the students start isolating himself with the leisure activities and the social activities to devote more time to the understanding of these programs for gaining success in the pre-departure programs. There are so many sessions in pre-departure programs that are meant for the intellectual development involving language learning and knowledge, expansion of the international perspectives, as well as, for personal development. The overarching aim and objectives for developing the intellectual level of the student including personal development and promoting and expanding the social change create so much burden and stress on students for implementing these things successfully (Danaher, Bowser, and Somasundaram, 2008). Hence, students avoid spending time in leisure activities and isolate them from social life. In order to meet the main goals and objectives of the pre-departure programs, the students focus on developing skills and concentrate most of the time on these sessions and their learnings. They start isolating themselves from all other activities, which also include less family time, no social activity, and other extra-curricular activities. They are focused on expanding their perspectives and learnings gained in the pre-departure programs and its sessions that they sometimes start ignoring the other aspects of life (Jiang, 2016). There are so many things that are being included in the session of the pre-departure programs that students used to spend most of the time of their day attending those sessions. As a result, the students feel so overloaded as the curriculum of these programs are so large in comparison to the ones they used to have. Moreover, the students tend to lose their own cultural values and beliefs in order to adapt themselves to the culture of the foreign country. For instance, since the focus of the pre-departure programs is to teach the culture learning of the country to the students, they used to spend most of their time in learning about the culture of their destination country, which in turn, takes the student away from their own culture. Moreover, they start spending less time with their previous social life and culture in an attempt to adopt the culture and social life of their destined country as the students are trained to adopt that in such kind of programs (Bankston, 2004). As a result of having no leisure, as well as, lost social life, the students develop a habit of leading a lonely life and cut them off from the entire social circle, which in turn can lead to the development of stress and anxiety. As a result, due to inefficient management of the programs, the students tend to have more adjustment problems in abroad (Liu and Rook, 2013). The lost social life and no time for personal activities will have a serious implication on my life. It is very important to have a balance between the professional or academic and personal life. The incapability of the student to handle this burden and over the stress of succeeding in these pre-departure programs actually leads to loss of personal life. Hence, it is very important to balance ones personal life and effective management of the sessions and learnings of this kind of programs without having negative impacts on ones life. References Bankston, C. (2004). Social Capital, Cultural Values, Immigration, and Academic Achievement: The Host Country Context and Contradictory Consequences.Sociology of Education, 77(2), pp.176-179. Danaher, P., Bowser, D. and Somasundaram, J. (2008). The student departure puzzle: do some faculties and programs have answers?.Higher Education Research Development, 27(3), pp.271-280. Herbst de Cortina, S., Arora, G., Wells, T. and Hoffman, R. (2016). Evaluation of a Structured Predeparture Orientation at the David Geffen School of Medicine's Global Health Education Programs.American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 94(3), pp.563-567. Jiang, X. (2016). Effect of Pre-Departure Culture Preparation Courses on Student Learning during International Fieldwork.Creative Education, 07(09), pp.1237-1243. Liu, B. and Rook, K. (2013). Emotional and social loneliness in later life: Associations with positive versus negative social exchanges.Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(6), pp.813-832. Wallace, L. and Webb, A. (2014). Pre-departure training and the social accountability of International Medical Electives.Education for Health, 27(2), p.143.