Life, especially that of a college student, is a constant cycle of being lost and found. 

This happens by design, though, as it often takes shedding old skin to grow into a new one. Instead of waiting for this lengthy operation to transpire on its own, young people traditionally take to an adventure guaranteed to expedite the process: travel. 

As USC students make their annual migration off campus for the summer and back again each fall, many return with revelatory foreign experiences circulating behind the same colored eyes as last semester.

Independent travel is a rite of passage: a handing over of personal freedom and identity. Whether flying halfway across the world or just moving out of their hometown, travelers are united by a desire to escape and lose themselves in a new place. 

Recent online discourse among pretentious travel snobs has made an enemy of the “tourist”: someone who, unlike the “traveler,” is thought to be ignorant to a way of life other than their own. 

But at the end of the day, all who travel are tourists. 

We all come from our bubbles of comfort, and despite even the greatest effort to live authentically in another culture, it’ll never be our own. Some travelers are apathetic and some empathetic, but all are outsiders nonetheless. The real distinction to be made among youthful adventurers lies between a traveler and a vacationer. 

All travel requires some geographical change, but a vacation stops there. Simply getting away from the physical environment of daily life is enough to suffice. But when you escape habits, expectations, perspective and –– above all else –– comfort, a vacation becomes a trip. 

There’s nothing wrong with a weekend at the beach with friends or a holiday spent relaxing instead of experiencing, but this shouldn’t be conflated with the plight of a traveler.

The most damaging are vacationers who mistake themselves as travelers. They might actually be in those eye-opening places and surrounded by cultures vastly dissimilar to their own, but they don’t dedicate the adequate amount of effort toward understanding their surroundings. This is who the internet has mistakenly and infamously labeled the “tourist.” 

In a world experiencing a growth of monoculture due to globalization, it’s even harder to find these pockets of cultural individuality. Bars in Southeast Asia play Western pop hits, and South American street corners boast McDonald’s just like they would in the United States, catering to comfort and making it easier than ever to “travel” within one’s realm of familiarity.

But growth isn’t acquired through comfort or familiarity. Simply going abroad isn’t enough; you have to intentionally seek out adversity. 

Take the train whose stops you can’t read, eat at the street food stand whose menu has dishes you can’t pronounce, because those are the events when experience gains meaning. 

Someone who understands the rewards of travel knows, as novelist Marcel Proust famously declared, that “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” A vacationer might leave just to escape, but a traveler seeks to discover after being lost.

Not all findings are entirely novel. You might notice values and issues abroad that are nowhere to be found back home, but you also might rekindle meaning in parts of your own life that have grown staid. 

As travel writer Pico Iyer noted during his 46 years abroad in at least 80 different countries, “in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.”

These experiences, deeply insular despite being inspired by outward culture shock, are the most valuable souvenirs you can bring home. As you come back to class and watch tedious lectures with the same eyes that have greeted locals and communicated more than a broken foreign language ever could, it’s your perspective that becomes widened. 

But you don’t necessarily need to travel to rural villages across the world to realize this –– there are cultural differences to be found at USC by just driving down the street or chatting with your classmate. 

Los Angeles County is one of the melting pots actively rejecting a global monoculture, with a third of its population made up of immigrants and over 26% of USC’s student body in Fall 2025 coming from abroad. 

Think like a traveler no matter how far from home you are, because a chat with your neighborhood fruit vendor might reveal more than a first-class flight and a five-star hotel ever could. 

Let travel expand your worldview beyond the bubble of privilege that exists at USC, not perpetuate it by flexing exotic locations on Instagram posts.

Traveling isn’t about total assimilation or cosplaying as a local, because we’re all tourists to places we weren’t culturally reared in. The difference is between those who seek validation from merely existing in other cultures and those who search for growth by understanding them.