Starting Over in a New Country: A Cornell MBA Student’s Journey

If you think getting your university acceptance letter is the ultimate finish line, let me gently burst your bubble. It’s only the beginning.

When I moved to Cornell University for my MBA, I quickly realized that getting in was one challenge. In fact, it was probably the easiest part of the process. Learning how to actually live, communicate, and navigate a completely different culture was another one entirely.

My first lesson in living abroad, though, didn’t come in the US. It came years earlier, during an undergraduate training trip to Belgium in 2019, at a McDonald’s counter, where I ordered what I thought was a safe, familiar choice: a veggie burger.

Plot twist: It wasn’t vegetarian.

The shock was immediate, but the takeaway lasted much longer. In the West, “veggie” doesn’t always mean what you think it does. Sometimes, you need to ask an extra question. That small, slightly horrifying moment turned out to be my first real introduction to a bigger truth: adapting to life abroad doesn’t just mean adjusting your plans. It means learning a new way of reading the world.

Food was just the beginning. The social rules felt just as foreign.

I was caught off guard by how casually strangers interacted in other countries. People in the US would make eye contact on the street, smile, and say, “Hey, how are you?”

My inner monologue, shaped by the practical defense mechanisms of home, immediately flared up: What do you want from me? Why are we talking?

But over time, I understood there was no hidden agenda. It was simply how people connected.

And that small shift changed something in me. I stopped seeing unfamiliar things as something to guard against and started seeing them as something to understand. At Cornell, I discovered that the warmth I once found surprising became one of the biggest parts of building friendships, networks, and professional relationships.

The country had its own way of teaching me too.

Those first few days in the US, even with my uncle around to help me settle in, were quietly disorienting. The gap between knowing you’ve arrived somewhere and actually feeling at home there is wider than most people expect.

It doesn’t close with one big realization. It closes through small moments: figuring out the buses, finding your way around a grocery store, understanding a new system, learning which conversations to start and how.

By the time I found my footing at Cornell, I understood that none of it, not the culture shock, not the awkward small talk, not even the burger incident, had been a setback.

Each one was a lesson I hadn’t signed up for, but couldn’t have done without.

That’s the thing about studying abroad that no acceptance letter prepares you for. The real education doesn’t begin in the classroom.

It begins the moment something familiar stops making sense, and you decide to figure it out anyway.