ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the many factors that make re-entry a unique experience. Coming home from studying abroad provides students with an opportunity to consider how personal factors like their country of origin, race, gender, intercultural experience, and readiness to come home have an impact on re-entry. The chapter also explores these ideas and gives university students a chance to consider how various aspects of their own identity and experience may have influenced their experience in the host culture, and their transition home. A student might have a life-changing education-abroad experience that lasted a month, and another might be away for a year and the experience might not have a great impact on the rest of their life. A student's own particular characteristics, and the characteristics of their experience, will have a dramatic effect on the way they experienced time abroad and will influence re-entry back home.
