Studying Abroad While Home Is Under Attack

There is something deeply disorienting about being away from home when something is happening to it. Not just distance in kilometers, but distance in experience.

I was in Copenhagen when my home campus shut down. Classes moved online. The building closed. Messages from administration started arriving in my inbox—measured, careful, trying to hold together a sense of calm while everything felt uncertain.

We have been living under a sky where calm and storm share the same horizon.

I read those words over and over again. Because they captured exactly what it felt like.

Being the Only One

I am the only student from Georgetown University in Qatar studying abroad in Copenhagen this semester. That fact had never felt particularly heavy before.

Until it did.

Because when something happens back home—when your campus is shut down, when the country you live in is being targeted—you realize how much of your emotional world is tied to a place that no one around you fully understands.

My classmates in Copenhagen were kind, supportive, curious. But they were not from there. They were not refreshing the same news. They were not emailing professors and texting friends just to ask, are you safe?

They were not reading replies that carried both reassurance and exhaustion.

“These dark times seem somehow to only be getting more horrifying.”

I carried those words with me. Through classes. Through group work. Through moments that were supposed to feel normal.

The Guilt of Distance

At the same time, I was… living.

Traveling. Presenting at a conference. Sitting in parks. Laughing with friends. I remember being in Glasgow, sitting on a bench near a fountain, trying to prepare for an undergraduate research presentation representing my university. One of my classmates was supposed to be there with me. She couldn’t come. That realization stayed with me more than the presentation itself. Because it introduced a feeling I didn’t know how to process:

What does it mean to be safe somewhere else when the people you care about are not?

Is it okay to enjoy things? Or does enjoyment become a kind of betrayal? I found myself sending emails that felt insufficient. Checking in from afar. Half-present in my own life, half-anchored somewhere else.

From Glasgow

Holding On Through Community

What carried me through this period was not clarity. It was people. Emails from professors that felt more human than academic. Messages from student affairs reminding us that we were not alone—even from afar.

“Community matters a lot during moments like this… I hope you’re finding ways to take care of yourselves and each other.”

And I was. In ways I didn’t expect. I spoke to wellness staff in Copenhagen—conversations that didn’t try to “solve” anything, but gave me space to sit with what I was feeling without having to justify it. I leaned on my classmates, even when I wasn’t sure how to explain what I was going through.

At one point, when I was working on my final podcast project, I asked them to help me read excerpts out loud—emails, reflections, fragments of what I had been experiencing.

They said yes immediately. They didn’t fully know the context. But they showed up anyway. And that mattered more than perfect understanding.

Makeshift recording studio

Turning Experience Into Work

That podcast became something more than an assignment. It became a way to process what I couldn’t articulate otherwise. A way to hold together contradictions:

• being here and there at the same time

• feeling safe and unsettled simultaneously

• continuing with academic life while everything felt suspended

I’m grateful that I was given the freedom to shape that project around something deeply personal. Not just to produce something polished—but to explore something unresolved. Because sometimes, the purpose of academic work is not to answer questions. It’s to sit with them.

What Stays

My campus has since reopened. But the feeling hasn’t fully left. Because what this experience revealed is not just the fragility of institutions, but the emotional geography we carry with us. Home is not just where you are. It’s where your attention keeps returning. Where your worry lives. Where your sense of belonging is tested, even from afar.

My campus has reopened, but the grotesque wars and injustices that made it close in the first place are far from over.

Final Thought

I started this semester thinking studying abroad would expand my world. It did.

But not only in the ways I expected. It taught me that distance does not dilute connection. If anything, it sharpens it. And that even when you are physically alone in a place, you are never really navigating things on your own. Not when community—across countries, time zones, and circumstances—chooses to hold you through it.