Why is it important to travel during your college days?
I could give you a hundred reasons and it still wouldn’t be enough. They say that life is like a book and those who don’t travel read only a page, and this couldn’t be any closer to the truth. And if one doesn’t travel during college, when else? College is the best thing that can ever happen to you provided you make the right friends, indulge yourself in the activities you love doing, and travel a lot. Let me elucidate on a few points to help convince you…
Traveling teaches you
When you got a free weekend available and a few willing friends, it’s never a bad idea to get out of the usual routine, pack your bags, and head out. It could be anywhere. Every journey changes you, for the better. Traveling can be a great enabler, acquainting you with necessary skills in life that you won’t find being taught in classrooms and workshops. You’ll learn how to survive in the direst of situations, how to make best use of what you have, how to manage money and time well, how to find your way around even when you seem lost, and most importantly, how to have fun.
Traveling inspires you
Speaking from personal experience (I’ve done a lot of travelling in my college days, and continue to do so), travelling can change the way you look at certain situations, and can inspire you to cross any hurdle life challenges you with. When I used to go on treks in my sophomore and junior year, standing at the base of the mountain, looking up at the peak and all the obstacles I’d have to overcome to get there, I found it very easy to give up. But with the help of my friends, a little perseverance, and just a little bit of crazy, I was at the top before I knew it, proud of what I’d done. Journeys like these change you because you assess any difficult situation with the knowledge that with a little persistence and hard work, there’s only one place you can go – to the top. With that confidence, you can do anything that comes your way.
Traveling gifts you with lasting friendships
When you travel with your friends, there’s a lot of time to share, discuss, and argue about in the journey. You become aware of little nuances in your friends’ personalities that you wouldn’t have found out otherwise, and hence you get closer. The kind of conversations you have with your friends are the little things that you won’t forget for a long time, even long after the trip is done (trust me, I know!). And college friends are the kind of friends we keep for a lifetime, so having these experiences only strengthen these friendships.
Traveling during college is the best time to travel
Let’s face it, though we’ve got a lot of assignments, quizzes and tests to take during the semester; we leave it all to the end. If you don’t, well then good for you, but for the rest of us, the semester leaves us with a lot of free time that could be spent travelling. Once we start working, it gets very hectic. It becomes pathetic because all we do during the week is wait for the weekend to spend time lazing around at home or the local watering hole, leaving no time at all for travel. Even taking a few weeks off from work to travel becomes an expedition in itself, especially if you’ve got a strict work culture.
Speaking from personal experience, I recently got back from the trip of a lifetime, to India’s north. We travelled to Agra, Delhi, Dalhousie (trekked here), Dharamsala, and Amritsar. I’ve seen places I’ve never been to before, done things I never thought I’d do before, and shared my deepest secrets with the best friends I could ever ask for. And I learned that there is no place and time like the here and now. Head out there, travel!
Traveling is one thing that can round-out your college experience. Read about a list of to-do things in grad school!
