ABSTRACT
The period preceding the actual move and the accumulated capital mobile students (and migrants) bring with them is crucial to understand how the sojourn unfolds. For this reason, this chapter depicts pre-departure variables which add important information to the demographic profile. Exchange students were the group learning the widest range of foreign languages. Whereas exchange students learnt across nine different foreign languages before the sojourn, in the group of international students this number was six and for the highly skilled immigrants it was four. The comparison of the motivations of exchange and international students discloses similarities and differences. Within foreign relationships developed abroad and in sojourner home countries, relationships abroad are more often positively correlated to intercultural development than relationships in participant home countries. Social structures and individual agency come into play in study abroad.
