While there are a few different approaches to actually getting it done, what we can perhaps all agree on is the fact that travelling the world while you’re still studying is a little more challenging than what most of us would have hoped it to be. The very idea of it sounds very romantic and is definitely something to aspire to, but in most cases your final-year assignments followed by your final year exams come long before you even think about actually paying a visit to that student flight centre office you’ve been walking passed every time you went to the mall.
Since so few students are actually doing it successfully, questions of whether or not travelling while you’re a student is indeed possible are considerably justified. Your parents or sponsors are perhaps the wrong people to ask, not because they’re classic party-poopers, but because all they really care about is that you make it through college or uni and get that qualification. It definitely can be done however, but keep in mind that it is indeed an exception rather than the rule, as is attested to by just how empty that students’ flight centre queue we spoke about usually is. So it’ll require a little bit of creative planning on your part and a demonstration of just how well you can manage your money and all the other resources available to you — and there are plenty of such resources available which students just never seem make full use of.
Join or Create a Travel Group
Look, as much as it may appear to you that you’re all alone in your desire to travel while you’re still studying, rest assured you’re not the only one suffering from the effects of the travel bug’s bite. If there’s no student travel group you can join, start one at your campus. It’s very easy to get support for these sorts of things, especially if there’s a tourism faculty or equivalent at your institution. Better yet, get your travel group sponsored by a travel agency, discount site or any other company operating in the travel and tourism sector.
Sometimes this is as easy as setting up a discussion forum, allowing the numbers to grow organically (and they’ll grow very quickly) and then inviting those travel-sector companies to participate. Once you’ve garnered your group of travel enthusiasts, you can harness the power of the group to negotiate travel deals almost completely on your own terms. This is how travel related discounts such as the much-used student bus pass are created on the initiative of the service providers, but if you take matters into your own hands and approach any travel agency or service provider as a group of students with just a little money to spend, they often can’t resist the marketing impact an endorsement from a group of students affords them.
This is just one way of creating the best chance for you and your fellow travel-enthusiast students to enjoy travelling while you’re studying, but there are many other ways. The main thing to take away here is the thinking behind making it happen.