I have been turning something over for a while, and I cannot find a way to write it down without sounding ungrateful. Let me try anyway.
Four years ago I came to Europe on an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. They gave me a lot: funding, a place to study, the chance to live somewhere new. I want to say that first, plainly, because what follows is harder.
I don’t think I will ever be treated as someone who is from here.
Not in the way I assumed I would be, eventually, with enough time. I used to believe, naively maybe, that there was a hierarchy you could climb if you worked hard, learned the language, did everything right. The official ladder is real. You can see it. Job descriptions, promotion criteria, integration courses, all of it written down and visible.
It took me longer than it should have to notice the other ladder. The unwritten one.
The quiet figure
Every workplace I have been in has had one. Sometimes more than one. Someone who has been there a long time, who doesn’t say much, who doesn’t seem to be doing the most visible work. After a while you start to realize they hold something the org chart doesn’t capture. Trust. History. The kind of belonging that doesn’t need to announce itself.
You can do the same job for ten years and still not have what they have on day one.
This is not about being mistreated. Most of the people I have worked with have been kind. It is something subtler. A feeling of being adjacent. Present, useful, sometimes even welcomed, but not quite of the place. I have spoken with others who have been here far longer than I have. Second generation. Sometimes third. The feeling does not always go away.
For a long time I told myself I was imagining it. That I was being sensitive, or that my culture made me read situations wrong. But I have heard the same observation from too many people now to keep dismissing it.
The door behind you
When my Master’s finished, most of my classmates went home. I thought about it. I visited. The situation back home was harder than I had let myself remember, and I could not make it work. So I stayed. Not because I belong here, but because the door behind me had closed more than I realized while I was walking through it.
This is the part nobody tells you before you come.
You leave thinking the move is a step you can undo. You can’t, not cleanly. The years you spend abroad are years you do not spend building a life in the place you came from. When you go back to visit, the country has moved on without you. Your old network has thinned. Your skills do not always translate. You arrive home as a visitor in both places.
A scholarship pays for tuition. It does not pay back the years you spend away from a place that was, and might have remained, your home.
What I would say to someone applying now
I am not writing this to tell anyone not to come. The opportunity is real, and I do not regret meeting the people I have met or seeing what I have seen. Respect where you are. Give back to the place that gives to you.
But if I could sit down with the version of me who was filling out that Erasmus application, I would want him to know two things.
Look at the unwritten ladder before you decide. Talk to people who have been somewhere five, ten, fifteen years and were not born there. Ask them, honestly, whether they feel they belong. Their answers will tell you more than any brochure.
Notice the cost of leaving, not just the price of staying. Open your eyes wider than the paperwork asks you to. The hierarchy that is written down is not the hierarchy that decides things.
Be careful with the door behind you. It does not always stay open the way you think it will.