For a lot of international students, university begins with an expiry date: just after your degree ends and the visa runs out.
It makes sense, then, that some of us end up keeping one foot out the door – treating university mainly as someplace to study, and never quite letting the place itself become part of our sense of home.
Among some of the internationals I know, I’ve seen that turn into a broader sense that London is somewhere we’re only borrowing for a few years: a place we live in as guests before eventually returning to wherever our real lives are supposed to resume.
But I feel that way of thinking sells these years short – and mostly at your own expense.
If you spend three years assuming that none of this is really yours, London risks becoming little more than a backdrop. Studying abroad can very easily become just another form of consumption – you can experience an enormous amount of a place without ever developing much of a relationship with it.
Some of that distance is just habit. But not everyone’s is – some people make a more deliberate calculation: a visa runs out whether or not you're ready, and the maths of eventual loss doesn't seem to favour investing in something you know you’ll have to give back.
I don't think that's unreasonable. But the grief of eventually leaving somewhere you loved isn't obviously worse than the flatness of never having loved it at all, and only one of those leaves you with something to carry forward.
Protecting yourself from loss by declining to invest in the first place isn't really protection. It's just a quieter way of losing the same three years.
And what you'd be protecting yourself from isn’t small. Three or four years is a substantial chunk of time, especially at this age. The people you meet here may become some of your closest friends. The things you experience here may completely reshape what you believe, what you want to do and even where you eventually decide to live. Calling all of that temporary doesn’t make it any less real.
For what it's worth, over half of UCL's students come from outside the UK — so whatever "the real UCL" is supposed to be, it isn't some fixed, pre-existing British thing that the rest of us have merely been invited into. We shape it just as much as anyone else.
That's one reason to invest in this place: because it's good for you. But there's a second, separate factor that has little to do with your own wellbeing: if you live somewhere, you have a right to weigh in on what happens to it.
Decisions made by UCL, your local council or the Home Office can materially alter your everyday life. International students have the additional pleasure of navigating visas, immigration rules, unfamiliar bureaucracies and restrictions on where and how much we can work.
It seems bizarre to conclude that having an opinion on all this is somehow someone else’s prerogative just because your passport was issued somewhere else.
And to put it bluntly, most of us have paid a shit ton and sacrificed so much just to be here. Why spend all of that time treating the place itself at arm’s length? Not because you owe UCL or London some grand act of civic participation, but because you owe yourself more than just a degree.
Of course, none of this is to say that you should abandon your nationality societies, speaking your own language with peers or maintaining communities with people from similar backgrounds.
Identity isn’t zero-sum.
I haven’t become less Singaporean because I now care what happens in and around Gower Street; if anything, where I came from shaped what I found remarkable about being here.
Back home, the state tightly limits political activity: most forms of political assembly require police permits and prior approval (ridiculous, I know). So it was rather surreal to come to London and, within a year, find myself leading a full-on student political campaign with minimal restriction.
But that didn’t require becoming British. It just required eventually accepting that the things happening around me were allowed to be my business too.
And I realise that commanding someone to feel like they belong never works. Feelings rarely appear because someone wrote an op-ed telling you to have them.
Fortunately, belonging often works backwards. You invest some part of yourself in a place first – in its people, communities, arguments or problems – and the attachment tends to follow.
I'm also aware that not everyone has the time or money to spend on this – working the maximum hours your visa allows while sending money home doesn't leave much room for "investing" in anything beyond survival, and that's its own unfairness worth naming.
Which is exactly why it doesn't have to be a grand gesture. Don’t wait until you feel sufficiently settled, sufficiently informed or sufficiently British before allowing yourself to have a stake in what happens here.
You can start much smaller than that: care about something around you, meet people outside the circles you arrived with, join something because it seems interesting.
Complain when something is shit, and maybe even join a student media society to write about it (wink, wink).
London has so much more to offer beyond pubs, parks, museums and a degree – the real value of moving somewhere new isn't just in experiencing it, but also having a life in it.
You don’t need to claim Britain as yours forever, you just need to recognise that your life here isn’t provisional.