How Study Abroad Can Change Your Life

By Aruna G.

April 22, 2022

Here in the Bay Area at KLS, we live in a bubble of a bubble. A small pocket that’s an extreme in culture and diversity… and sometimes I wonder what it’s like in “the real world”. But having lived in no other country (or state), and not gone to any other highschool, I can only imagine what that mysterious world is like.

When I learned that our very own admissions director, David Joiner, had lived in 4 different countries and visited 36 others though, I thought I’d found a shortcut: listening to the stories of someone who had accumulated his own worldly experiences. 

David’s passion for travelling to remote places began with an offhand conversation with a family friend. He remembers it went something like this: 

“You should go do your study abroad in Nepal!”

“Where is Nepal?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll love it!”

A few months of Nepali language training later, David boarded a plane, heading to Nepal in a study abroad program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His home for the next year was Nepal, and a highlight was spending several months with a family in a village along the Annapurna Circut. There, he fell in love with culture, food, and customs of the high mountains.

“The best way I can describe it to people who haven’t traveled to remote areas is like being in the middle ages,” he says. Living amongst this village of only 300 people, he was awed by their true subsistence lifestyle realizing how “far removed” we are from objects that meet our daily needs in America. In Nepal, families had to cut the wood of their house, build it from the ground up, sew their own clothes, and till the fields for food themselves. 

Unlike here, where hubs are built around people who are software engineers, or some other occupation making up one part of the assembly line, the villagers of Nepal had to have mastery of the full scope of their trade just to survive. So his friends didn’t “work at the same job” rather when he sat around the fire every night to eat and sing, he did so with the doctors, buddhist priests, government officials, teachers, and combinations of all thereof. 

Inspired by this remarkable experience, David decided to major and eventually get his first masters degree in South Asian Studies. After finishing, he found a job taking tourists on expeditions in the Himalayas and was soon hired by Sherpa Expiditious, an adventure travel company. He eventually led tours of high altitude base camps throughout Nepal— Everest, Annapurna, and Kanchenjunga.

This was just the start of David’s adventures. A coin flip between China and India landed him in China for six years. A friend’s offhanded comment, “I heard Laos is interesting” turned into an impromptu trip there. That’s all it took for David to waltz into the airport, and he laughed at the idea of a pre-booked ticket, “I don’t advise planning ahead.” It is definitely advice he follows well. 

So what’s a world traveler doing at little KLS? This is one in a series of roles that have brought together his passion for travel with education and he’s worked as the head of international admissions at UC Santa Cruz, the director of global engagement for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, head of China Programs for AFS (the largest highschool year abroad organization), and even led highschool summer trips to Asia for Where There be Dragons.
There is no short cut to getting the first person insights of traveling abroad, and I am disappointed I won’t be able to join KLS in its international adventures. Maybe at Rice I will take a study abroad of my own… though perhaps adjusting to life in Houston TX will take a while in itself. In the meantime, I plan to read The Master and Margarita (1987), one on the list of David’s international book recommendations.
Thirty-six countries later, David has developed a conviction towards the importance of international travel. “Going to a new place,” he said, “is like reaching out really far with your front foot and before you know it your back foot isn’t where it was before.”