Where should I go for sabbatical?

If you’re planning to go away for your sabbatical, you may be wondering where you should go and how to even decide. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably also wondering if you have to go somewhere related to your research and whether you need to affiliate with a university while you’re there. The purpose of this post is provide you with a set of questions that will help you determine the answers to your questions about where to spend your sabbatical away. First, though, I want to share something I didn’t realize when I was planning my sabbatical away:

You can spend your sabbatical anywhere you’d like. 

That’s right. Where you spend your sabbatical can be related to your scholarship, but it doesn’t have to be. 

When I started planning my sabbatical away, I was operating under the assumption that a sabbatical away only “counts” if you go somewhere related to your research. I do field research in Tanzania, so I assumed that I needed to spend my sabbatical collecting data in Tanzania. 

There are no hard and fast rules for where you need to spend your sabbatical away. Sure, it may make sense to affiliate with a university abroad or in another city or to travel to a specific location for archival research or fieldwork, but there’s no rule that you must do this.

For reasons I won’t go into here, I spent the away part of my sabbatical in Bordeaux, France. I had no good reason to be there, except for the fact that I wanted to live in Europe, travel with my family, and eat delicious food. I decided not to go to Tanzania because what I really needed from my sabbatical was to recover from burnout and finish projects, rather than start new ones. Being in a place unrelated to my research gave me the time and space to do just that. 

So, if you take nothing else from this post, please remember that you have a choice in where you spend your sabbatical away! 

Now, you may be wondering, “If I can theoretically go anywhere for my sabbatical, how do I choose?” Great question. Here’s a process I recommend because it worked for me and many academics just like you:

1. Figure out your sabbatical purpose

Determining what you need from your sabbatical will help you get clarity about where you should spend your time away from campus. 

The first question you need to ask yourself is: “What do I want to get out of this time?” As you consider this, be very honest with yourself. Consider how you’re feeling now, and how you want to feel by the end of your sabbatical. You may be in a place personally and professionally where the purpose of your sabbatical is to publish something or write a strong grant proposal. Or, you may be burned out and need to recover. You may want to use sabbatical to start a new project. Or, you may need the time to finish projects. 

There are as many versions of sabbatical as the academics who take them, and the key here is determining what you need most, in your current season. 

Determining the purpose of your sabbatical can be harder than it seems, because most academics have been conditioned to keep doing more and more, without considering our own needs. I encourage you to take some time to reflect on this question of what you need from your sabbatical and to write down your thoughts. You may be surprised what you learn!

2. Consider the people in your ecosystem

If you have a partner and/or kids who will be spending sabbatical away with you, the next step is to think about them and their needs and expectations for sabbatical. Academia teaching us to be individualistic, but from my perspective, a sabbatical is not an individual endeavor. Your sabbatical affects your entire ecosystem. While you don’t have to take everyone’s needs into consideration when deciding where to go for a sabbatical away, you’ll want to, at a minimum, think about your partner/spouse and/or kids as you determine your sabbatical location. 

When it comes to kids, you can decide how much or how little you want them involved in the early planning stages, but I do recommend starting to talk to your partner or spouse early on about possibilities. 

Here are some questions you can discuss with your partner/spouse:

• What do you (partner/spouse) need professionally during our time away?

• What are you (partner/spouse) hoping for personally?

• When thinking about a place to live, what is important to us? (e.g. climate, proximity to professional opportunities or connection, availability of public transport, proximity to family)

• What do we hope for this time away as a couple/family?

• What goals do we have for our time away? (e.g. travel to new places, learn a new language, slow down, spend more time with extended family, etc.)

Here are some questions you can think about in relation to kids:

• What do the kids need academically and socially during our time away?

• What type of place would help support the kids’ needs? 

You’ll notice that this step in the process is not fully about your academic work. It can be exciting to think together as a couple or family about what sabbatical can be, beyond the professional goals. I know it may seem strange to do this, but in my experience starting with these bigger questions is really important to picking a sabbatical destination that works well for your whole family. 

3. Create a list of possible sabbatical destinations

Based on your own thinking and your conversations with your partner/spouse and/or kids, you hopefully can now come up with a short (or long!) list of potential sabbatical destinations. 

At this point, you may also want to explore funding possibilities, like Fulbright. If you’re interested in this, check out, How to fund an international sabbatical, and Sabbatical 101 Episode 48, Tips for getting a Fulbright to fund your sabbatical. 

4. Determine the feasibility of your ideal sabbatical destinations

In an ideal world, you would choose your sabbatical location, buy a plane ticket, and go. In the real world, there are logistics to consider such as: Do I need a VISA to stay for an extended time? How do I get a VISA? Can I afford to live in this place? Can my partner go to this place for X months/year? Will they be able to work from there? Are there schooling opportunities for my kids? Can I afford them?

This is where the rubber meets the road. If you plan to affiliate with a university during your sabbatical and/or if you get a fellowship during your sabbatical, the university or institution granting the fellowship will hopefully help you secure a visa. Personally, we went to France because while Americans can only stay in the EU for 90 days without a visa, we were able to obtain a 6-month long stay visitor visa without too much trouble. Ultimately, you may be limited by your ability to get a visa, so this is something I would look into earlier rather than later.

For us, school for the kids was another big consideration in narrowing down sabbatical destinations. While I love the idea of my kids learning a new language, since we only planned to spend 5 months abroad, I wanted to put them in a bilingual school so that part of the trip wouldn’t be so completely overwhelming. I located small bilingual schools in our top two destinations, Bordeaux and Valencia. We couldn’t afford international schools, so locations that did not have affordable bilingual options did not make our final short list.

You will likely have other logistics to consider, too, such as whether you can afford housing in the place you’d like to live for sabbatical. I found it helpful to create a spreadsheet where I could put all the logistical considerations for each of my short-listed sabbatical destinations side-by-side. This helped us determine whether each destination was really feasible.

Final thoughts and timing

Hopefully after you’ve gone through these steps, you’ll be able to narrow your top sabbatical destinations down to one or two places! In my experience, you’ll want to start this process sooner rather than later. If you’re applying for funding, you’ll want to start the process 1.5-2 years prior to your anticipated sabbatical start. If you’re self-funding, you can probably start planning 9-12 months before you hope to leave. 

If you need more guidance determining your sabbatical destination, I’d love to share how I can support you. You can schedule a free consultation here. I also have a self-paced program, Family Sabbatical, that guides you through all the steps to planning your sabbatical away.