I’m an American who just started my first year of undergraduate studies at the National University of Singapore last month. I chose Singapore over the US because I wanted to live abroad, and Singapore checked pretty much every box for me: it’s in Asia, tropical, safe, developed, and English is the medium of instruction.
Now, even though NUS is a great university by global standards, the reaction I’ve gotten from many of my family members and friends is that choosing to study abroad as an American is inherently a downgrade, regardless of the university or country. That’s where my question comes from.
I spent a few years abroad as a American teen. I spent time with host families all over the UK and Ireland, a brief time in Prague. This was quite awhile ago now but one of the things I found comforting while I was there was that they were often more ignorant of America than we were of Europe. The terminally online Europeans you find on Reddit and Lemmy are insufferable. But the average European you meet on the ground is just as down to earth and provincial in knowledge as any flyover state American.