The sun was setting over Berlin as our group settled down to dinner. We had come to the end of our teacher training orientation in the German capital, but before heading to Frankfurt to begin our placement, our coordinators had taken us on an excursion to Potsdam. It was a lovely day, and to close it off we were treated to a three-course Ukrainian meal by our providers, Gotoco. The coordinators – not much older than us – regaled us with stories of their adventures on programs teaching overseas. They spoke of drunken escapades in rural China, cheaping out on cross-continental transport across Europe with innumerable train connections, and even working under the watch of protection rackets in Thailand. By the end of the evening, my newly acquainted team and I were looking at each other more in trepidation than excitement.

So began my own Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) program. These courses offer university students and recent graduates the opportunity to teach children in other countries while pursuing a TEFL certificate, a qualification often needed to find paid employment as a second-language English teacher overseas. Various providers offer the courses, and owing to the government funding they receive, many can offer participants funding for accommodation, transport and food.

“TEFL courses sometimes involve more than meets the eye”

The attractions of these programs are immediately obvious, from the chance to break into the education industry, to travelling on the cheap and enjoying a ‘free holiday’. As my initial experience demonstrated, however, TEFL courses sometimes involve more than meets the eye. Factors such as burdensome workloads and cultural differences can complicate a marketable image of professional development and cosmopolitan immersion. Are TEFL programs too good to be true, then? I spoke to a few students at Cambridge about their experiences completing these placements to find out, uncovering what the TEFL experience is really like.

A common motivation for embarking on a TEFL program is the opportunity to make new friends. Where you end up can vary, from summer camps to regular schools, and hours will shift with all manner of extended care roles and supervision duties for children staying overnight. The flipside to this is that you share experiences and develop points of commonality with your fellow teachers very quickly. Ethan Cain, who volunteered in Poland through the company Angloville, said that “because of how intense it is, you form quite strong bonds with people, so it’s hard to say goodbye so soon.” The cameraderie can become one of the most pleasantly surprising aspects of the experience. Emily Simpson, who completed four programs with the same company across Europe, echoed this, claiming her friend and herself had “never bonded with a group of people so quickly before […] we’re both still in touch with quite a few of the people we met there.”

Nor are the professional and personal development opportunities that a program like this offers anything to sniff at. Both Ethan and Emily stressed the attractiveness of gaining a free TEFL certification as a key draw of the placement, with Ethan emphasising its particular benefit considering that teaching English abroad was “something I would consider doing for work in the future”. The chance to travel can also present itself in unusual ways. Brad (not his real name), who completed a Gotoco program in Vietnam, recalled not only funded excursions, but the time “they flew us out to Thailand for the weekend, in order to renew our visas.” For young people eager to see the world, completing a teaching placement overseas is a near-unrivalled opportunity.

“The emphasis TEFL companies place on a sense of adventure and exploration can be called into question”

These benefits do not come without strings attached, however. TEFL programs are not simply free holidays, but ultimately constitute a form of work. That they are especially labour-intensive cannot be overstated. As Ethan says, “having conversations all day, especially with people who (a) might not have the best English, and (b) are teengagers who might not really want to talk to you, is really draining on your social battery.” Emily reports running twelve-hour days completing various activities, sessions, and trips, adding that she “definitely wouldn’t recommend doing more than three weeks in a row without a break.” I can personally testify to the tremendous intensity and strain these programs can put on young people. I regularly experienced extreme tiredness by the end of the day, unable to explore the city further beyond heading home for a quiet night in, or drinking with my colleagues (a habit which these programs unsurprisingly often make necessary). During one particularly arduous shift, I lost my voice completely after my team of six (including myself) shepherded over 100 pre-teens around the Frankfurt subway system on a day trip to the zoo.

Yet being thrown into the deep end isn’t all bad. Offering pastoral care to children and bonding with them beyond the classroom can socialise you extremely well. Brad had the chance to play in a basketball Sunday league on his program, while Ethan fondly remembers evenings spent watching the Euro semi-finals and finals with his classes: “The kids all supported Spain and the Netherlands, just to annoy the English people!”

Nevertheless, these programs are generally characterised by their unpredictability. Workload, finances, travel – many of these aspects, in reality, may not live up to what volunteers initially expected. Emily highlights how she had to pay for a deposit and her own flights, while Brad considered his Vietnamese hosts to be “stingy” when reimbursing him for his food and travel costs: “[They] would always be weird about the taxis we had to get to teach at the school, either making us pay for them or saying we spent too much on them.” Experiences can vary within the same groups in unexpected ways. Brad describes how, while he was provided with lesson plans, some of his peers had to make their own – a “surprisingly difficult” task, he considers. Meanwhile, in my TEFL program, there were a few ‘overnighters’ who looked after children boarding at the camp all week, unable to join the rest of us to relax during weekday evenings. In addition, the emphasis TEFL companies place on a sense of adventure and exploration can be called into question. With some of her camps located in the “middle of nowhere,” Emily occasionally found it difficult to travel around during the programs themselves. While not necessarily misleading, these programs can contain some unwelcome surprises.

“The optics of Cambridge students backpacking to third world countries, staying for only a few weeks while making an arguably minimal difference to local childrens’ education, are not brilliant”

These surprises occasionally slip into overtly questionable incidents. Brad recounts a time he was asked by his Vietnamese supervisor to teach her daughter one-on-one at home instead of providing lessons at the school in Hanoi. Upon reporting this to his TEFL coordinator, Brad describes that “she acted surprised […] but didn’t ask me for the name of the boss or any specifics.” The experience left Brad feeling suspicious about the transparency of the companies and clients he had been recruited to work for: “I feel like it’s very fishy.”

Loose, sporadic organisation is arguably inevitable, given the confusing nature of TEFL program arrangements. Providers such as Gotoco or Angloville receive government funding to board and train teachers, who work at local schools and camps to deliver teaching, while often living with independent host families. However, a persistent theme I heard from volunteers related to concerns about the wider branding of TEFL programs. Not only can their claims about allowing volunteers to travel and explore be called into question, but also those of charitable humanitarianism. Multiple student volunteers I spoke to described teaching not in underserved areas, but in Montessori and Waldorf schools – typically elite institutions which clash with the TEFL mission of outreach.

The realities of cultural immersion can also be quite different to the expectation. Berating bilingual children for speaking their native tongue to each other outside of lessons in their own country – as I, a foreigner who only speaks one language, was instructed to do – feels awkward and wrong. The optics of Cambridge students backpacking to third world countries, staying for only a few weeks while making an arguably minimal difference to local childrens’ education, are not brilliant. They recall those of white saviour mission trips. Brad experienced these uneasy dynamics, describing how “people asked to take pictures with me in the street just because I was white.” On the flipside, the experiences of non-white volunteers are complicated in their own ways. During my program, both my host families appeared revealingly taken aback when meeting me for the first time, quick to probe beyond my self-professed British identity with questions to uncover where I was “really” from, with a bluntness unusual in Britain. (Never mind that they had both seen my name before I arrived!). The implications are clear. Contrary to an idealistic impression of cosmopolitanism that these programs like to perpetuate, entering these cross-cultural environments can involve encountering and coming up against difference – in ways that, while not malicious or even intended, are often uncomfortable.

Do these considerations, then, irrevocably count against teaching English overseas? Not necessarily. For one, many of these negative criticisms – from workload intensity and unpredictability, to bias and discrimination – are not at all unique to TEFL programs, but can characterise all kinds of work and volunteer environments. All the student volunteers I spoke to said they would encourage others to follow in their footsteps: “The more you put into a program like this, the more you get out of it,” as Ethan puts it. For those who like working with children and would consider teaching as a career, it’s a great way to break into an industry. Even if you’re just a keen traveller, however, it’s a largely accessible option for people from all sorts of backgrounds. Following Brexit and the government’s recent rejection of EU youth mobility schemes, it’s clear that these programs are one of the few remaining ways for working young Brits to see other parts of the world cheaply.

And consider the fun you could have! In the space of one week on my program, I led classroom lessons for the first time, attended a street food festival, toured children around a botanical garden, attended a nightclub in Frankfurt with my team, moved from one homestay to another, and met both families (looking after cats for the first time in the second homestay!), went to a nude beach, watched the Euro final with strangers in a beer garden on the river Main, and made plans with my new teacher friends to visit each other once we were back in the UK. Make no mistake, a TEFL placement will be an unforgettable whirlwind. In Ethan and Brad’s words, be “ready for anything,” and prepare “to be surprised every day”. In doing so, you’ll grow immeasurably as a person, becoming more affable and spontaneous, while learning how to talk to and handle conflict with anyone. ‘Transferable skills’ are certainly buzzwords, but they genuinely apply to the TEFL experience: a TEFL program will set you up to succeed in whatever future path you choose.