Summertime is here; everybody pack your bags. For some of you, a strange new world awaits on the other side of an airplane ride. Summer is the season for study abroad, and Columbia’s Office of Global Programs is very good at getting you wherever you want to go. Amman. Beijing. Kyoto. Paris. Rio. Shanghai. Venice. And those are only the Columbia programs; there is a sufficiently impressive list of direct-enrollment partner institutions to follow. But why are you going? Is it for the women? Or, maybe, the men?

I doubt that language and culture majors (and certainly the OGP) will appreciate my alluding to study abroad as a kind of sex tourism. I should know—I am one of them and did my own travel in the summer of 2011 to Kyoto to brush up on my Japanese. But before I am accused of unfairly fronting a sexual metaphor and thereby confusing the acquisition of cunning linguistic skills with blow jobs, let me propose that travel abroad for utilitarian reasons ought to be lauded instead of booed down.

It is unfashionable to say that you’re travelling abroad for a reason. What, after all, separates “sex tourism” from an innocent case of international fun-in-the-sun? Intent does. Intent to travel for sex is morally abhorrent; unintentional sex during travel is simply epiphenomenal. It makes it difficult for a language and culture student to admit to going abroad for just one or two things, say language acquisition or research. It’s the right thing to say that you’re going abroad because going abroad is valuable. Study in a foreign country, I feel, is seen in colleges like our own as intrinsically good, a real case of l’art pour l’art. Perhaps that explains why the requirements for study abroad, while not insignificant, are usually not rigorous: a few semesters of language and one regional course requirement.

But can it really ever be something as transparent as travel for travel’s sake? Writing down in your application that you want to go to X country so that you can learn about X culture and therefore become, by some transitive property of cultural immersion, a better global citizen seems nebulous and somewhat dishonest. I would perhaps be more comfortable with a purely functional statement of intent: I travel because I want to learn a language, or prepare myself for a job in the region, or do research for a thesis, etc. Convincing your program coordinator (and yourself) that you can traverse cavernous cultural gaps and attain cross-cultural nirvana in the space of an eight-week summer program—or even a year-long endeavor—is presumptuous. It smacks of a sort of noblesse oblige—go out there and learn about country X: isn’t it quaint?

The flip side equivalent would have been my coming to Columbia so that I could eat some hamburgers, shoot a gun, attend an American football game, and go out with tall people with pale skin. That’s easily recognizable as a perverse sort of cultural voyeurism, a real-time Times Square peepshow into the lives of Other Peoples.

But it’s not like that. Americans are not some “foreign people”: I am. I did not come here chasing some reductionist pin-up dream of the United States, nor did I come here to be one of a group of other internationals guffawing and comparing notes over our new, but temporary, homes. In a lot of ways, I came here to be alone in an overwhelmingly different world; I wanted to be the foreigner, not to behold the foreign. It is and was difficult, isolating, and mind-bending. It’s rewritten a lot of my assumptions about myself, added on a few new cultural codas, and asked a lot of me.

The idea that you have to buy in so very absolutely to a new culture is perhaps a rather demanding teleological stance to be taking on study abroad. Realistically, I don’t think you should have to adopt every country you try to understand. But it helps to step back and think about what your intentions are: why you’re going, and whether your reasons are fetishistic. Because it’s one thing for a foreign student to buy into a culture—but another thing altogether to see that culture prostituted.

Po Linn Chia is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian studies. She is chief of staff for CMUNNY and a member of the Global Recruitment Committee. Ever the Twain runs alternate Tuesdays.