Moving abroad to study is no small task and can lead to plenty of headaches down the line if you don’t consider things carefully before setting off. To help ensure students experience a smooth move, here are a few essential things they need to think about before moving to their new home – from handy packing tips to useful advice about language learning.
 
Income
 
First things first, how will you support yourself? This may sound like a strange one to begin with, but you’d be surprised by just how many students don’t fully consider their finances before moving.
 
The attraction of a new life and a new start abroad can be intoxicating, and lead you to make rash decisions and head off too soon. So before you pack your bags, make sure you’ve got everything in order, even if you already have a student loan/grant/scholarship, a part-time job lined up or a passive income to keep you afloat.
 
Either way, it’s always helpful to have enough savings to support yourself to begin with. Besides, moving to your new home a few weeks before you start studying can give you some time to explore your surroundings and settle in, without the added stress of adjusting to a new course.
 
Packing
 
Packing your life away can take up a lot of space, and space when moving abroad comes at a premium. So to make your move cheaper and less chaotic, think about what you’ll really need in your new home. For example, if the climate in the US is warmer than that of your home country, will you really need all those thick winter clothes?
 
Clothing can pile up quickly, so before you start packing, it’s a good idea to invest in some vacuum bags. These are simple to use and, once filled with your clothes, can be used to compress your luggage so that it stays fresh, nicely pressed and takes up less room.
 
Gadgets are another must-have item when you relocate. It’s important to backup your files before moving, though, especially the photos and videos you hold dearest, as even the most well protected laptops and devices can be damaged en route. Take plenty of plug-in adapters with you as well, as there’s nothing worse than carrying a heavy laptop halfway round the world to realise you can’t use it straightaway.
 
Documents
 
Making sure your visas and passports are in order is a must before moving – you won’t get far without them. So before making tracks, research all of the legal red tape you’re likely to encounter. What are the rules and limitations of your visa? Will you be entitled to things like healthcare, or will you need a health insurance plan to cover you while living abroad? Considering these matters before moving abroad is imperative to a smooth transition, as well as returning home if you need to, and can save you money in the long run.
 
Language
 
If you’re not a native English speaker, learning a new language can be hard – but it can make the difference between fitting in and feeling isolated when you first arrive. Knowing a few handy phrases and having a reasonable understanding of the local lingo before you move can make relocating a lot simpler too.
 
One of the main roadblocks to learning a new language for many people are memories of school and the thought of spending hours sat in front of a desk reciting from a textbook. This type of learning, however, though common, isn’t the best way to retain new words and can actually hamper your ability to recall new vocabulary.
 
To truly learn a language, you need to spend hours immersing yourself in it, using books, songs, speaking to native speakers and watching foreign TV and film. Learning this way also teaches you colloquial, everyday language and can help you to sound more like a native speaker.
 
Settling into your new home
 
Getting used to your new surroundings can take some time, so make sure you put plenty of effort into getting settled before you start your course – taking home comforts like your favourite snacks can make a real difference when you’re feeling homesick.
 
Feeling like you’re truly ‘home’ is important, which is why you’ll need to try and get out of the habit of referring to your old home as ‘back home’. This kind of comparative language can feel so natural and automatic, which is why it can be difficult to shift the habit. But to keep homesickness at bay and to help you settle, it’s best to avoid using phrases like these.
 
Moving to a new country is never simple and can involve jumping a lot of hurdles before you even get to passport control. Take plenty of time to organise certificates and visas, ensure you have plenty of savings to fall back on and get to know the language before you move abroad – all of these things can make your transition much smoother and simplify your integration. 

Sabrina Bucknole is a professional copywriter from the United Kingdom. When she’s not looking for her next adventure abroad, she spends her time writing about travel, international living and studying abroad. Some of her most recent, previous work includes: https://www.livinginperu.com/5-reasons-why-peru-is-attractive-to-expats/ and https://www.recruiter.com/i/taking-a-job-abroad-get-these-10-things-in-order-first/

It can be disorienting to go to school in a new place. The challenges of a new environment and level of scholastic stress are even more overwhelming when you’re an international student coming to a college in a foreign country for the first time. Here are some of the strategies that you can use in order to deal with any cultural shock that you may be experiencing.

Develop a Support System

The biggest way to combat culture shock is to have a support system that you can reach out to when you start to feel homesick. This support system can include friends and family that are at home, but you also need to establish relationships closer to where you are now. Try to connect to other international and local students. Being able to sit down with someone on a daily basis can help you to find your equilibrium. The biggest problem with cultural shock is that sometimes you don’t feel like yourself anymore and can start to get lost in the shuffle. Remember that other students will also be sure to feel out of place, and that you can help lift others and be supported in turn.

Create Familiar Atmospheres

Surrounding yourself with familiar items helps to maintain your self-image and comfort. For example, you could read a favorite book or play music from your home country. You could even share parts of your home with others; installing speakers in your room will let you share music with roommates if they’re interested, and hanging posters on the wall can spark conversations. This affords you the opportunity to share your culture with those around you. Creating a sense of home away from home will enable you to combat some of your anxiety.

Keep a Routine

A routine will help you be able to keep up with school even when stressed. It also serves to get you out and interacting with others, which is good for your mental health. As a part of your routine, you should incorporate exercise. A healthy body is a major part of maintaining balance in your life. In order to deal with some of the cultural shock, consider joining an activity like a sport or game group on a regular basis. This can help you to make new friends that can become a part of your support system.

Get Prepared
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There will likely be differences between your culture and your school’s culture. Getting prepared will assist you in making the transition. Being prepared on a mental level is one of the best ways to overcome your cultural shock. Absorb what’s going on around you and remember to reserve judgment. Every culture is unique in its own way. This is part of the reason you wanted to study abroad and expand your horizons.
Coping with cultural shock doesn’t need to hold you back in your studies. Employ these techniques to help you integrate without experiencing the negative side effects.
 
Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChapla

If you are struggling with writing in English, you are not alone. English might be the most widely spoken language, but it is the most complex one in the world. Writing in English is agonizing to many people, and some don't even believe that there is a way to improve it. However, no matter how much you think you have mastered the art, some person, tool, or software will always point out a mistake in your writing.
If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you are a writer already, and are looking for ways to improve your skills. Use the following tips and tools to improve your English writing skills.

1.  Know how to spell English words correctlyYou don't want to change what you mean by spelling words incorrectly. You also want readers to understand what you mean. The best way to do so is to ensure you master English spelling. You can use flashcards to practice the correct spelling of words. When you have time to spare, test yourself to see how much you have mastered. 
Tools such as Grammarly, Ginger, and most word processors can help you become a better writer. These tools will catch grammar errors and propose to you the correct way to spell the words. 

2.  Use punctuation the right wayYou need to polish your punctuation skills if you want to improve your English writing skills. Poor usage of apostrophes, commas, and conjunctions can change the meaning of an entire sentence. Check if your writing is properly punctuated by using a tool such as Grammar Girl. 
This tool posts regular blogs or podcasts explaining how particular punctuation marks are used. The Economist Style Guide and Grammarly are also good tools that can guide you on how to use punctuation marks, abbreviations, and more. 

3.  Expand your grammarGrammar is the ingredient that makes your writing stand out. Proper grammar requires you to use appropriate punctuation marks, tenses, and contextual words. Luckily, this is not two decades ago. There are very many tools that can help you with your grammar. The most widely used is Grammarly. 
It is a free tool from Chrome that checks the correctness of your grammar, corrects grammatical errors, and teaches you how to avoid the same error in the future. Grammarly also checks for poor vocabulary use and contextual spelling errors. Grammarly is quite useful when writing an email, blog, or a social media post. 
Other tools that can help you improve your grammar include Ginger and Grammar Girl. Install one in your computer today. 

4.  Use simple sentencesIf you want to be a great writer, you don't want to bore your readers with long and complex sentences. Keep your sentences simple, short, and less complicated. Think about how readers perceive information. The simpler sentence much easier perceived by the brain and remembered. And don’t forget to also maintain a nice flow of your sentences. If you are struggling with forming simple sentences, don't worry because there are applications available to help with this. 
The Hemingway App is a free tool that will help you break down long and complex sentences into simple sentences. The app ensures your writing is immediate, direct, and doesn't use the passive voice. It also has a feature called readability score that lets you know how easy it is for your readers to read your text. 

5.   Read a lotThe best English writers are also regular readers of English material. Written materials such as newspapers, books, and brochures help you master different styles of writing. They also improve your vocabularyand grammar. If you are looking forward to becoming a better English writer, expand your skills by reading even more challenging material. However, you must always ensure they are within your line of interest. Underline words you don't understand, then look for their meaning later. 

6.  Practice! Practice! Practice!Like any other art, practice makes perfect. If you want to improve your English writing skills, you must put that pen on paper and write something. The more you write, the more you get better at it. You can look for a personal tutor, professional instructors, or a native English speaker to help you with your written exercises. 
Such persons will correct your work and give you feedback. You can also use apps such as 'hello talk' or Grade Mark to check. These give you feedback on whether you are using the correct style and grammar or not, which will improve your skills. 

Wrapping UpWhether it is for academics, profession, or a personal routine, written communication is a crucial skill today. Unfortunately, there is no magical pill to swallow to help you master written English skills overnight. You must invest time and effort to finally get it right. However, writing English doesn't have to be an intimidating experience. It can be fun too. Use the above tips, and you will notice a significant improvement in your English writing skills.
 
Author’s Bio: Randolph Bunnell is an experienced copywriter and blogger. He works as a freelance writer and regularly contributes to various blogs and online magazines. Randolph also has a medical background and shares tips about health problems in his blog Skin Answer.

Thanks to tech advancements, internet, smartphones, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are collectively revolutionizing the education sector as we know it and making learning a little bit “cooler”. Globally, education entities have made AI investments to the tune of billions in an effort to cope with the fast-changing world. Tech companies, on the other hand, are continually designing intelligent systems that “think” through and memorize information in an almost identical fashion to humans. 
 
Smartphones and tablets are also having their fair share of contribution to this new trend. All learners need to access volumes of information is a browsing device and an internet connection and everything else falls into place. There are even university courses on the internet today, not forgetting the articulate, easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials on literally every topic imaginable. 
 
These tech advancements aren’t only changing how learners consume information. It is sweeping across every big and small department within the education sector. I’m talking changing how educators interact with the learners, how classrooms are set, to how grading and awarding are done. In a nutshell, technology has successfully made education a personalized experience rather than a mass exercise. The learner has a direct link to the information sources and the educator’s role has changed from being the information owner to a learning facilitator. 
 
Case Study
 
Osmosis is offering students smart, highly effective ways of studying thanks to technology. The organization has an assembly of thousands of video tutorials, flashcards, and guiding questions that assist learners to access information in a more consumable fashion. All you need is to purchase a study plan amongst a host of their plans and you will be good to go.
 
Learning by osmosis is no longer a far-fetched dream. Learners of pathology, physiology, and pharmacology have greatly benefited from this form of learning. They get personalized learning and exam schedules based on each learner’s potential and previous performances, reference materials, and personalized reminder emails that keep the learners on their toes at all time. At the end of it all, learning becomes fun and effortless. 
 
Ways through which Internet, AI, and Smartphones are Shaping the Education Industry:
 
1.         Enhanced continuous learning
 
Traditionally, learning started at a finite age- say 3 years- and ended somewhere in the mid-20s. It is as if learning has a specified shelf-life and then once it reaches expiry date, it is substituted with working life. This trend is swiftly coming to an end thanks to the internet and smartphones. People in their 60s and even 80s are now learning through their phones. People are using YouTube tutorials to learn about lawn management, rodent control, cooking, and many other areas that they previously thought were reserved for professionals. 
 
2.         Teaching method algorithms
 
Traditional teaching methods have been blamed for putting all learners into a single basket and then teaching, testing, grading, and awarding them using the same parameters, without caring about how unique people are. Some learners are good in sports, others are good in social sciences, others are good in math, while others are good in sciences. Thanks to AI, educators can be able to tell where exactly a student is weak and where he/she is strong. That enables them to focus more on the strengths other than condemning a kid to failure just because he/she is learning the things she can’t comprehend. 
 
3.         Learners are more empowered with information.
 
Previously, educators have been focusing on training learners on how to handle different tasks in an already-established job market. There wasn’t really any room to learn and tweak things in the market- graduates had to fit into the system otherwise one would be deemed unprofessional. Well, not anymore.
 
Thanks to the internet, educators are now challenged to prepare learners to become innovators. Graduates can now enter a profession and change their outlook from within. No one will ever be forced to conform to ridiculous industry requirements anymore.
 
4.         Better grading
 
Thanks to AI, students will soon start getting the grades they deserve without having to worry about impressing the examiners. Machines have the ability to read a learner’s handwriting, mark an exam, and then grade it appropriately. Professors will no longer hold the fate of the students.
 
5.         Kids will be teachers as well
 
If a kid is conversant with computers and programming codes from as early as 5 years, then he/she is a prime candidate for teaching roles. He/she can, for example, help her mother to organize her recipes or teach her grandparents how to use different prescription drugs. In a classroom setup, that kid can teach her teachers how to set up different tech learning tools. In simple terms, technology has made it possible for teachers and learners to change roles every now and then. 
 

Author Bio: Laura is a marketing specialist at SEOforX. She helps her company advertise its products and services and she has a thorough knowledge on developing marketing approaches for products and brands. Besides being a marketing specialist she has a special interest in financial technology. She finds Fintech fascinating and writes about how the new technology is being used to improve activities in the finance sector.
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Is traveling the purest form of education? Without a doubt, it is. My experience as a traveling single mother of two has taught me that there are tons of information and knowledge out there waiting to be tapped into, most of which a four-walled classroom will never satisfactorily provide to its learners. I have traveled both locally and overseas and that has helped me to grow as a person and to see the world with an enhanced optimism. My kids, on the other hand, have had a chance to interact with many different people and cultures and that has opened their minds to great opportunities, now and in the future. 

Unlike a classroom that confines learners to only the knowledge that textbooks provide (some of which is inaccurate), the world out there is one big pool of raw, undistorted data. The more you quench your thirst for knowledge in this pool, the more you realize how thirsty you are for more and more. What’s more, traveling is a fun form of education which doesn’t require you to sit for exams every now and then. And again, where else can you study as you vacation? 
 
Technology has made traveling easier and cheaper than ever before. Like in my case, I’m able to backpack across continents together with my kids with an unimaginably small budget. Vacation rentals are everywhere nowadays so accommodation isn’t an issue anymore while blogging and YouTubing has grown to become reliable income sources for travelers. If you are anything like me, therefore, you will be able to travel the world with only a camera, a laptop, a versatile bag, and anything else that you feel is essential for your traveling.
 
I know what you are probably asking yourself right now: Are there other solid reasons that would convince me to leave everything behind and follow the wind all over the world? Well, here are the 5 reasons that qualify traveling as the purest form of education:
 
1.         History is most real when you travel
 
If you are a history enthusiast like my kids and me, you will find traveling very fulfilling and fun. Everything you have read in your school library is a tiny part of a greater puzzle that is the history of the world. Do you want to understand British history in the rawest form? Just visit London; walk around its streets and visit different museums. Do you want to learn more about slavery? Visit West Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA and talk firsthand to the descendants of the slaves. In a nutshell, you will understand the history of a people by interacting with them and sharing in their pain.
 
2.         A road to self-discovery
 
For those who travel purely for vacation purposes, traveling is a bed of roses whose extravagance and glamour is to be admired. But this isn’t entirely the case. Traveling with the aim of learning takes you to places that you can’t fathom as of now. You will meet people who live in abject poverty, societies that were destroyed by civil war or diseases, as well as people who have experienced the worst form of tribalism, ethnicity, and religious intolerance. I have seen all these; I have volunteered to help where I could. At the end of it all, I have developed a stronger sense of resilience, tolerance, courage, and patience. My kids have discovered strengths, passions, and interests no one would have thought they had. If life is a school, traveling is, indeed, the best class to be in.
 
3.         Boosting your social skills
 
Social skills, social development, and a host of other courses taught in high schools and colleges are good at boosting the learner’s confidence, but they cannot beat traveling at that. Traveling necessitates inner confidence that helps you to ask for directions from strangers, speak foreign languages even when you understand very little of it, and trust people you probably could not have trusted had you been home. The practicality of traveling boosts your social skills in ways you can never imagine.
 
4.         You learn new languages
 
Forget translation apps and the foreign language classes you’ve been attending. Traveling and interacting with a language right from its source is invaluable. If you want to learn French, book a vacation rental in Paris and spend some time with French native speakers. During summer, If you want to master English and yet want to visit some of the best beaches in the US, I would recommend visiting Florida. You will learn the official language, the slang, the exact pronunciation, accent, and much nitty-gritty that your teacher cannot teach you. My teenage son speaks 5 international languages fluently and can get along with about ten others, yet he has never been to any language class.
 
5.         You understand the grandeur of nature
 
Are you a nature enthusiast? How many conferences on global warming, nature conservation, air pollution, and climate change have you attended? As many as they could be, their combined value can never exceed the value of a trip to regions affected by all those things. You cannot appreciate the importance of wildlife conservation until you visit Africa, for example, and discover how poaching is swiftly wiping wild species from the surface of the earth.
 

Author Bio: Laura is a marketing specialist at SEOforX. She helps her company advertise its products and services and she has a thorough knowledge on developing marketing approaches for products and brands. Besides being a marketing specialist she has a special interest in financial technology. She finds Fintech fascinating and writes about how the new technology is being used to improve activities in the finance sector.

The latest figures show that out of the estimated 7.5 billion people on Earth, 1.5 billion individuals speak English. For those who are looking to adopt a new language, studying English as a second language is a wise choice for this reason alone. Knowing English can be useful in a variety of everyday situations. From business to travel, to daily conversations or consuming media, it is easy to run into situations where the language is important to know. It is also helpful to learn English from native speakers to have the best grasp of correct vocabulary and pronunciation.

If you are considering taking a trip to the United States to learn English as a second language, explore three reasons to do so.

It is spoken in many countries around the globe

Whether studying castles in English history during a university course, or traveling the world, one will quickly find that English is spoken almost everywhere. In fact, English is the official language of about 50 countries. This makes it the third most popular language among the entire global population. From islands such as Barbados and Antigua, to countries such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, it is easy to find English speakers. Knowing the language becomes even more crucial, then, for those who plan to travel the world for leisure, business, or both.

Over 1 billion people speak English as a second language

It may come as a surprise to know that of the 1.5 billion global English speakers, over 1 billion speak it as a second language. Only 400 million are said to have English as their first language. Across all continents, it is common to run into individuals who can hold even basic conversations in the language. Therefore, because of how useful and ubiquitous it has become, it is no surprise that so many individuals choose English as their secondary language. If you choose English as your second language, you will be joining a large global group who has already done so.

It is a valuable skill for employment

Currently, over 50% of the world’s population can speak at least two languages. With the persistent increase in globalization, it is becoming more important than ever before to be able to communicate with people around the world. This is especially true for those who work in businesses that have international employees or clients. Rather than having to hire translators, companies are continuously looking for employees who can speak multiple languages to assist with day-to-day business. Individuals who know more than one language (especially if one of those languages is English) can expect to have better job opportunities than those who do not.

Speaking English as a second language has many significant benefits. Whether you are looking to use your knowledge for fun and travel, or to gain an advantage in your career, learning English can be an extremely helpful tool.



​Author Bio: Karoline left her corporate job to spend more time with her family and indulge in her passions of writing and travel. She now works as a freelance writer, offering advice and tips on a range of topics.​