We all know that there are pros and cons that apply regardless of the major of the student on a study abroad plan.
However, are there benefits and/or drawbacks that seem to be more applicable to a particular set of majors?
Can you be more specific? You ask the question too broadly.
If you are one some rigid track, which is perfectly legitimate, it might not be good for an incipient career, but in general, it is a good idea for personal development to live abroad and see alternative points of view.
I suspect that the field-specific benefits are mostly in the academic aspect of study abroad.
For example, access to courses not taught at home.
Yes, there are benefits that study abroad has for some majors that might not apply for others. For example, architecture majors benefit greatly with study abroad because they see architecture that they could not experience at home, while business majors won’t have the same experience because they will learn the same thing abroad ad they would at home because business does not rely on the environment as much as architecture does.
And, of course, linguistics, area studies, and a few areas of humanities and social sciences as well…
STEM subjects are generally considered to be difficult majors for year abroad programs, as they often follow quite a set pattern, and the pattern varies in different regions. For example, the US physics major is very defined- virtually all programs have the same core courses, with similar names and similar content. so that they are comparable for grad school. The same is true in Ireland- and the material covered is very largely the same as well. But: the material is arranged differently in Ireland, and in some cases taught in a different order, so finding equivalent courses can be hard. The same is true for math.
So the STEM majors at Goucher, Soka (these are the two schools in the country with mandatory study abroad) often have to stay in college for five years?
I talked to some colleges about this, since my intended major is engineering and I also wish to spend a semester abroad. It was suggested that I try and take as many major-related courses as possible in my freshman year, so that I could use my semester abroad to complete general distributional requirements.
I don’t know that I would make the leap to saying that they generally take 5 years, @Catria - I don’t know those programs well enough to comment specifically on them. My guess would be, however, that if study abroad is mandatory the college will have made some efforts to make sure that requirements can be met through the study abroad options. It’s not that it’s impossible, it can just be harder, and often requires more forward planning (as @OrchidBloom notes).
Studying abroad, I believe, would be very beneficial if you would like to take a degree related to Business, Culinary or Arts. Most of the people I know who have studied/are studying abroad have degrees in those fields.
My kid found that USC film school does not accepted courses taken abroad for her particular major, so she didn’t do study abroad.
My kid who graduated in 2014 with a double major in film and media studies and history studied abroad in Denmark. I can’t say for sure that his experience contributed to his acceptance to grad school but I think it helped. About a third of AFI’s students have an international background and to produce 3 films during the first year, students must be able to collaborate with a wide variety of people.
Note that colleges/unis in the US, outside of fields like engineering and other more vocational majors, almost never require more than 50% of your courses to be in your major (and often less). That leaves plenty of space for study-abroad even if you can’t take any applicable courses in your major. For something like engineering, the engineering school may have its own study-abroad program that they make work for their engineering majors.