In my last missive to this learned publication, I considered the positive benefits of vacation or short-term work experience abroad for undergraduates of ocean and earth science. But what about the more complex “year abroad” study? The two main differences from vacation work are that (1) the time scale is longer and (2) it counts towards a student’s bachelor grade or master/PhD success. With vacation work, in the unlikely event things are not as a student hoped, he or she can either go home after a week or put it down to life experience. Even I can put up with a Days Inn for a week (well, maybe a day or two), but I wouldn’t want to live in one! With the work forming a significant part of the student’s degree program, it has to be right—academically and emotionally.

Boxall, S. 2009. The oceanography classroom | Working away from home–The longer-term option. Oceanography 22(2):258–260, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.59.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.