Somewhere in the DM right now, someone is asking a friend, family member or agent about relocating abroad for school. Someone else is crunching numbers, convincing themselves they can borrow money to pay the required fees, land abroad, get a job and pay it all back in three months. It sounds logical. Until it isn’t.
Behind the TikTok videos and Instagram photos is a reality most people do not share; the lonely days, the warehouse and cleaning job that you didn’t bargain for, the huge debt and fighting to survive in a foreign land that seems to be after your mental health.
This week, FunTimes spoke with a Nigerian man who moved to the UK in January 2025 as an international student. Chuks’s experience has been eye-opening and humbling. Here’s what he wishes he knew before relocating.
Borrowing money to relocate is a trap
This affects more people than anyone admits. I have seen people who borrowed money from family and friends, or even collected from monthly contribution groups, with the hopes of paying back in a few months. The truth is that you may not get a job immediately. Finding employment as an international student takes time and patience, but no one will tell you that. Even if they tell you, you will not believe them.
Even when you do find work, your student visa caps you at 20 hours a week, which is basically survival money. That is not enough hours to make serious money, and certainly not enough to repay a significant loan while simultaneously paying rent and buying food. By the time you are done with bills, you are left with almost nothing.
You are supposed to be studying, adapting, and building. Instead, you are anxious, pressing your calculator every day, and fielding messages from people back home who want to know when their money is coming. Before you know it, you are under so much pressure and can not even sleep well at night.
If you do not have a realistic plan to service that debt that does not depend entirely on immediately finding a job, do not relocate on borrowed money.
Studying abroad goes further than your tuition
When people calculate the cost of studying abroad, they think it is just tuition, but it is only the beginning. When you land abroad, you need a place to stay, and rent is not cheap. It will take the largest share of whatever you have. There is transport: buses, trains, the occasional Uber when it is raining, you missed your bus, or you are running late. You have phone bills, internet subscriptions, and the small daily expenses that seem minor individually but add up to something significant by the end of the month. As an international student, you have to budget for everything, not just tuition, because reality will always exceed your estimates.
Finding a Job as an international student is harder than you think
People make it sound easy, like immediately you land, you get a job. For some people, it worked that way. For many others, it’s months of searching, applying, and hoping one clicks. You’ll likely apply to multiple places before hearing back. Some organisations want full-time staff, not those who can work only 20 hours. And when you do find work, you will very likely find yourself doing something beneath your qualifications, like retail, hospitality, and warehouse shifts. Several Nigerians who have built something meaningful abroad have a season of humbling work in their story. It is hard to avoid these jobs as bills are real and are not waiting for you to have a professional job. You have to do these jobs while you keep building toward what you actually came for.
Housing will test your patience and your standards
If you can, make accommodation arrangements before you land, or all your money will run out on Airbnb. Also, some houses will look great online but so tiny in real life. I once viewed a house that looked like a cupboard. Sometimes you’re choosing between “affordable” and “livable.” Then again, you have to provide a whole lot of documents before a landlord will give you their house, and when you are new, it can be really difficult to get the documents they are requesting.
The one that shocked me the most was the shared apartment. You will be living with total strangers and sharing a kitchen. It could be a three-bedroom apartment with just one toilet and one bathroom. You would have to share with people who have completely different hygiene habits, cooking cultures, and noise tolerance. Imagine being a clean person and ending up with flatmates who are “pigs”.
Homesickness is real, and it hits you more than you expect
When you see videos of people crying online because they are homesick, you would think they are just being dramatic. You tell yourself that you are a strong man, nothing will shake you, and that you will be too busy making money and enjoying your new life to miss the old one. Then one random evening, you start craving that ewa agoyin they sell on your street, the point-and-kill you have every Friday while hanging out with your guys, or a local dish you cannot find anywhere in the UK. And just like that, something tightens in your chest, and you realize you are not just hungry, you are homesick.
Or is it the random evenings when something small happens? Like when you are already running low on cash, and your shift gets cancelled without warning. You sit in your room staring at your account balance and before you know it, tears are rolling down your face. You remember how you never lacked back home, how you always had something coming in, and how you never imagined you would be struggling to get shifts for a cleaning job in a country you thought would change your life. You miss the noise. You miss the ease of picking up your car keys and driving to a friend’s place just to gist. As they say, you will never know until you come and experience it yourself.
You are on your own
In Nigeria, even when you are independent, there’s usually someone, a sibling, family friend, neighbor, who can step in when something goes wrong. In the UK, everybody is minding their own business. I remember a colleague who took her car for repairs and forgot her house keys inside. She didn’t realize until she was already at work. She called the car shop to ask if they could leave the keys somewhere discreet, maybe by the tyre, so she could pick them up after her shift. But of course, this is the UK, strict rules, no bending. They told her they couldn’t do that for “security reasons.”
She didn’t have anyone to send, no neighbor to call, no friend who lived close enough to help before the shop closed at 6. That night, she could not get into her own house and had nowhere to sleep. She ended up travelling almost 40 minutes to another town just to stay at her aunt’s place.
That is the thing about living abroad. You don’t realize how much community you had back home until you need something as simple as someone to help you pick up your keys.
The real preparation is mental
You can budget correctly, pack the right clothes, choose the right course, and still struggle if you have not prepared yourself for the emotional weight of what it means to start over. The loneliness, the gap between your expectations and your daily reality, and the moments of doubt when you wonder if you made the right move. You have to prepare your mind in advance and know that things will not be rosy at the beginning. Starting over is never easy, but it gets better with each passing day. “Prepare well, but also prepare for what nobody tells you.”
