University – A Stepping Stone or a Stumbling Block for TCKs?

I’ve been speaking to a lot of old friends from high school, mainly through Facebook since most of us are spread around the world, about our experiences as third culture kids going to university, and the response I got was quite unified. We all seem to think the same thing…

Back in high school it was quite easy being a third culture kid. We were all expatriates, or at least we all went to an international school. Even the teachers (usually American, Canadian, or British) knew what it was like to travel a lot and be away from home. We grew up in an isolated community where people didn’t care about your accent or nationality, and bullying was very rare. In international schools there is a feeling of solidarity and trust that you will find in no other institution, because people realise that we are all essentially the same, no matter what background.

Going to university, I find myself yearning for the international school community more and more. Old friends I haven’t heard from in years are reconnecting, and my Facebook timeline is full of reunions between international students. We are at the point in our lives where we are no longer traveling with our families, but we are trying to find ourselves on our own. More than that, we have been thrown into communities of non-TCKs and come to realise that the expatriate world is a lot smaller than we thought. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not complaining about my background as a third culture kid; I am just saying that the older we get, the more complicated the concepts of identity and belonging seem to become.