How Study Abroad Fosters Wisdom and Self-Knowledge
The Three Rs of DavisConnects give students skills to leverage their time abroad
While backpacking on a steep trail in Mexico’s Sonoran Desert, Jianing Liu ’26 twisted her ankle. It was the penultimate day of a Jan Plan wilderness trip with the National Outdoor Leadership School, and she was tired. She stopped and let herself cry.
“I really thought about giving up,” said Liu, an educational studies and statistics double major and one of seven students on Colby’s first NOLS-sponsored trip, in 2023.
But when an equally tired classmate offered to carry her 40-pound pack, she realized she was surrounded by kind people who could help. By accepting that help, she drew on an attribute she only recently identified as a skill: resourcefulness.
Resourcefulness is one of the Three Rs of DavisConnects, a new initiative to help students shape their study abroad experience. The Three Rs—resourcefulness, resiliency, and readiness—is a simple skill set that broadens students’ understanding of themselves in foreign cultures and at home.
Nancy Downey, director of off campus study at Colby, believes the Three Rs will help students experience greater personal growth and gain leadership skills. And importantly, they’ll be able to articulate their abroad experience with more depth and clarity.
“I want to give them some guidelines for a way to frame their experience,” said Downey. “To a potential employer but also to be able to talk to their family and friends about it in a meaningful way.
“We stress to students that honing their skills in these three areas adds up to an ability to commit to mastering one’s circumstances no matter the circumstances, in any context and throughout life,” said Downey. “I think these are skills that we rely on daily, but in tough times, they’re just invaluable.”
Knowledge versus wisdom
Downey conceived of the Three Rs in 2022 after pandemic-related travel bans were relaxed. When considering anew what she wanted students to gain from study abroad experiences, she reflected on skills she learned studying and working in the former Soviet Union, beginning in 1984 with subsequent trips throughout graduate school at the State University of New York, Albany and Brown University.
“I was there under Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which was the restructuring of the Soviet Union, and there were food shortages and things like that. It was really hard just to live there,” she said. Later, while running Boston University’s internship program in Moscow, she saw BU students accustomed to the comforts of the United States endure hard times.
She boiled down the skills she obtained abroad to resiliency, resourcefulness, and readiness and coined the Three Rs.
These skills differ from knowledge obtained in a classroom, which is typically measured with tests and essays. Off-campus experiences such as traditional study abroad and many of the short-term experiences funded by DavisConnects offer students knowledge and wisdom, explained Downey.
“We differentiate wisdom from knowledge as something less tangible, not as easily measured, something stealth that you don’t even realize you are gaining until years later.”
Self-awareness versus self-knowledge
Downey sees the Three Rs as helping students move from self-awareness (what we do) toward self-knowledge (who we are). She describes self-knowledge as more encompassing because it involves other people. Self-knowledge and wisdom are closely related, and study abroad hastens both.
“Wisdom is the kind of thing you get from encountering a different culture, where you’re gaining self-knowledge about how you are in a different environment, how you relate to other people, and what other people are like. You see how similar they are to you when all you saw initially were the differences,” said Downey. “Your compassion and kindness grow.”
DavisConnects introduces students to the Three Rs during pre-departure workshops and encourages awareness of them while abroad.
Liu listened carefully during her pre-departure workshop. As an international student, she felt she was already resilient. At 17, she left her home in Jinan, China, to study at the United World College Maastricht in the Netherlands for her international baccalaureate degree. The independence and adaptability she relied on there grew her resiliency.
She wasn’t, however, as adept with resourcefulness or readiness. Initially, she defined resourcefulness as reaching out to others for help, something she avoided in the Netherlands for fear of looking “stupid” or weak. Readiness she saw as giving back, but something more organic than the community service required in high school.
In that moment in Mexico with her ankle throbbing, everything clicked. She witnessed resourcefulness firsthand in accepting help and readiness in her classmate’s offer of help.
“Resourcefulness is having lots of resources and being able to find them. Like a safety net,” said Liu. “But it’s also about trusting people, about opening myself up to a person. And also learning something from everyone. Seeing special attributes in people, and being coachable.”
While readiness, she said, is being primed to give back to the community, to people who help you. “You receive help, you give help. It’s interconnectedness.”
Liu took her wisdom from Mexico and used the Three Rs last summer during international student orientation at Colby as a buddy and peer mentor to incoming first-year students. With newfound confidence, she helped them navigate course selection, faculty office hours, and homesickness. As a writing tutor in the Farnham Writers’ Center, she introduced American writing conventions to one of her buddies, from Vietnam, and helped her brainstorm research papers.
These interactions are all examples of how she uses the Three Rs and how they’ve made her stronger.
“I think the Three Rs philosophy helped me connect dots. In all of these examples, there’s a common thread. If I was not introduced to them, then I wouldn’t be able to connect them, you know? I would just see them in isolation.”
The elegance of the Three Rs
Downey can’t stress enough the value of students spending time abroad—and taking the Three Rs with them.
When it comes to applying for jobs or graduate school, the Three Rs shouldn’t be overlooked. DavisConnects reminds students that these skills represent some of the value-added aspects of their Colby education.
Downey emphasized the elegance of the Three Rs and their relevance to all of the integrated work at DavisConnects.
“We survey our traditional study abroad students on pre-departure and upon return, and we’ve seen exponential growth in all of the Three Rs. Our employer engagement team talks about them in career advising,” she said.
“Our entire team underscores that they can bring them up with potential employers in articulating what sets Colby students apart from the pack and positions them as change masters and future leaders.”
