“More Aware of Everything”

At the intersection of the topics of migration and diversity in higher education lies the experience of people who grow up overseas, or who go overseas for education or military service, and then return as college students. This article addresses their experience, drawing from a series of exploratory interviews conducted—as part of a broader distributed research process on diversity—at one particularly diverse American university. The overseas experience, as would be expected, generally broadens student perspectives but also individuates them by first removing people from existing personal networks and established cognitive routines, then inserting them into new networks and cognitive patterns overseas, and finally reinserting them back into a “home” situation in the United States that is both familiar and now newly alien. The legacies of return thus include a resorting and reconfiguration of notions of self and identity as well as those of family, community, and nation. Overall, the process suggests a useful parallel between the student as traveler and the traveler as student. There is also a warning in this material that much human diversity involves very individualized experiences that may be overlooked in the more generalized literatures on education (especially higher education) and human mobility.