Top Five Things to Know About International Travel for College Applicants

One of the most frequent questions I get from the students I work with is whether or not they should spend their summers going to faraway places to enhance the college application. In fact, the number of students who have been asking about this has grown exponentially in the last 10 years.

As a general rule, I counsel my families to not spend inordinate amounts of money on travel just for the sake of enhancing the college application. There are five considerations I think you should consider if you are only travelling internationally to enhance the college application:

1. Everyone is doing it. This is obviously an exaggeration, but a huge percentage of my families are traveling to the most exotic locales they could possibly imagine, including the Balearic Islands and East Timor in order to prove that the student has become a “Citizen of the World.” Let’s face it: if everybody is trying to outdo each other in the international travel department, then it will not set your application apart from others.

2. Duration is important. If you’re going to a faraway place, the most important thing to remember is that you’ll impress college admissions officers much more if you spend the entire summer there as opposed to just a week or two. If you are doing what many students do, like go to Europe for a few weeks and visit Paris, London, and Rome, you’ll impressive exactly no one. On the other hand, if you spent 10 weeks in Warsaw attending a university summer program and doing meaningful community service, then that actually will enhance the college application (so long as everything else looks fine). See point number five below.

3. Locale matters. The more American tourists you see in a foreign country, the less your visit matters to your college application. Virtually every country in Western Europe would fall in this territory, as would Costa Rica, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and – surprisingly – China. These are countries that many Americans and their families travel to, and their commonness makes your application no different from others. Now, if you have spent time in Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, or Albania, and if you did something truly interesting and spent some time doing it, then it probably will matter in your application.

4. Be careful of how you market the experience. One of the main things I hear from college admissions officers is that many students will do a one or two week volunteer trip to some faraway land, and then use that experience as the heart of their college application. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with doing a volunteer trip. On the other hand, if you use that one week visit to Peru to define your entire high school career, that becomes a problem. You’re not selling yourself based on the totality of your college experience; rather, you’re focusing merely on a one or two week vacation/service experience.

5. Travel will not compensate for deficiencies on the application. Finally, there is absolutely nowhere in the world a student can travel to in order to remedy a disastrous grade point average, lackluster activities, or weak recommendation letters. Don’t look at traveling to exotic locales because you perceive this as an opportunity to cancel out weaker parts of your application.

Full disclosure: I love international travel. I recommend that students do travel as a learning experience and also because of the pure joy of meeting new people and in experiencing different cultures. But my general opinion is that international travel is overblown as a determinant of who gets into the nation’s most selective colleges and universities. In any event, do see the world, but remember that not everything you do in life has to be targeted toward improving the college application. Travel, enjoy yourself, but don’t do it only for the college application.