Joe's story
When he was younger, Joe Dipple’s family almost moved to the US. He had become excited at the prospect of seeing a different part of the world, not just on a holiday, but actually living it.
It’s something many of us crave, the feeling of being somewhere that feels, sounds and looks different and being there long enough to explore and experience it properly.
Sadly, plans changed, and the move never happened, but it left Joe with an itch for travel. So when the opportunity came up to spend a year abroad while studying at the University of Worcester, Joe grabbed it with both hands.
21-year-old Joe had just finished his first two years of his degree in Marketing, Advertising and PR when he took the plunge.
“I started in Sweden, in Halmstad and then I moved on to New Zealand, where I was at Unitec in Auckland,” said Joe.
Studying abroad gave Joe the chance to see what life is like in two vastly different places, both a world away from the Midlands where he grew up.
“It very much felt like travel,” he said. “When I was in Sweden, I could literally get on a train that took me through Copenhagen, Oslo, all the countries of Scandinavia. I saw Norway, and I went into Finland on a couple of occasions. I went dog sledding across snow, and I saw the Northern Lights.”
Meeting new friends and hearing about their home countries, sharing stories from your life and hearing about the wider world is one of the most rewarding parts of travel. For Joe, those early conversations with new acquaintances have given him some lifelong friendships.
“On the first week they had this massive welcome for everyone, and I made friends with people from around the world,” recalled Joe.
“We all joined a group chat and so we knew what everyone was getting up to, so someone would say ‘we’re going to play pool’ or ‘a few of us are going to book to go and do something’. There was a big holiday to Lapland too.”
Joe has already hosted one of his friends back in the UK.
“On the first week they had this massive welcome for everyone, and I made friends with people from around the world.”
He said: “One of the friends I made is from the Czech Republic, and he was here in England with me last week! He came to stay for a week, and we went out and had fun before I came back to university for this year, and as soon as we saw each other it was like we’d never been apart, it was lovely.”
The group chat means it’s easier than ever to feel like the friendship circle is still together, even when everyone flies back to their home countries.
“I’ve made so many friends through travelling, my phone still rings all day with the group chat we’re all in and we’re heading to Germany in the coming weeks to meet up again. There’ll be eight or so different people there who all met in Sweden.”
Travelling to two different locations means that Joe has come away with an even more diverse group of friends.
He said: “It was the same for New Zealand too. The experience there was quite relaxed but I do still have people I talk to all the time there and we’re always messaging!
“I remember when I was invited with some friends to go on a last minute trip to the South Island. We spent a week where I rented a car and drove from Christchurch to Queenstown, stopping to see all the sights and we did some incredible activities.”
It’s remarkable to think that while he was studying, he was able to go bungee jumping, sky diving, mountain climbing and so much more.
Joe’s studies are very much business orientated, but whatever your field of study, combining it with travel adds to the educational experience and gives the people who do it the full experience of ‘going travelling’, and for Joe, that was very important.
“The university side was fun and engaging,” said Joe. “It gave me the chance to work with people from around the world and the work was academic, but it was never overwhelming which allowed me to have the freedom to make the most out of the opportunity to travel.”
“I had spoken to my parents a lot about what I wanted to do, and I thought travel was a good thing to do, but if I wanted to seriously get out there in the world I would need a degree, because that was going to be my stepping stone in life.” he said.
“So when I saw the study abroad option, I thought, you know what? I’m taking this opportunity to get my degree and travel too.”
Once the decision was made, Joe had to figure out how to cover the costs of it all.
“I got some of the flight costs reimbursed, and there was the Turing Grant, so I got money from that and there was more maintenance and student finance funding as well. I also spent the summer working 50 hours a week to get as much money as possible!”
There’s nothing quite like leaving a place and knowing you didn’t get round to doing it all. “I got everything I wanted,” said Joe. “I’m so happy!”
When you travel, you face challenges.
“Now that I’ve been out into the world, I feel like I can go anywhere and do anything.”
Navigating a language barrier, finding your way in a city where the street signs are presented differently, and that’s before you start learning local customs.
For Joe, the challenges have had a huge impact on him.
“It has changed who I am for the better,” he said. “I was very anxious before I went away, I’d have lots of doubts in my mind and I would catastrophize scenarios a lot. But when I went travelling, I was thrown in at the deep end.”
He remembers how the challenges started as soon as his first plane took off.
He said: “I’d literally never been on a plane on my own before and the airline lost my luggage on my flight to Sweden! I had to go to the shops and buy clothes and some things to keep me going, and experiences like that gave me all sorts of skills.”
On reflection, Joe knows you can’t prepare for that exact scenario in advance, but you can make yourself mentally resilient to it.
He said: “There’s an analogy, that when a bird lands on a tree branch, it doesn’t have to trust that the branch won’t snap, it just has to trust that its wings will catch it if needs be, and that’s pretty much what I’ve learned, is that, you know what? It’ll be alright.”
The sense that he doesn’t need to know everything in advance now, and he’s prepared come what may, has influenced where Joe sees his life in the future.
He said: “Study abroad has reinforced in my mind that I want to get out there more. Now that I’ve been out into the world, I feel like I can go anywhere and do anything. In terms of a career? I have no idea.”
He added: “I don’t want to have too rigid of a plan because I know they change, and actually, I can now say that some of the best things that ever happened to me happened completely spontaneously, so I’m going to be keeping my options open.”
On a door in Joe’s family home is a collective bucket list, where his family write what they want to do. Joe said: “We’ve all written a bunch of things on it, and in the last year, I’ve ticked off six out of the seven things that I had originally written on it, and that’s amazing.”
