Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

When US first lady Michelle Obama took her mother and daughters to visit China, she sent out a clear message to young people: They should try to broaden their horizons by studying abroad.

It might be a hard call for American youngsters, who are not known for their interest in other countries. The authorities are doing their best to change that, though.

The US government launched its "100,000 Strong China" initiative in 2010, and "100,000 Strong in Americas" initiative in 2011, aiming to send 100,000 American students to study in China and Latin America respectively over four years.

Private educational institutes have also been trying to encourage their students to get global experience. Many US colleges offer optional programs for students to study abroad. Goucher, an art college in Baltimore, in 2006 became the first college that requires undergraduates to study abroad at least once before graduation.

These efforts have generated some results. The latest statistics from the Institute of International Education found that 283,000 US college students studied abroad in the 2011/2012 school year. The number has more than tripled in the past 20 years, and yet less than 10 percent of US college students end up studying abroad.

China has an easier job to do. In a country that believes that "read 10,000 books and travel 10,000 miles" is the best way to learn, interest in the outside world has been boiling since the reform and opening-up began in the late 1970s.

Since then, more than 2 million Chinese have studied abroad, making China the No.1 source country for international students.

The benefits of global experience are obvious. Maya Rudolph, an award winning 26-year-old filmmaker in New York, told me she has been interested in film since childhood. But she never thought she had the courage to get into the industry until she went to Beijing in her second year of college to study Chinese.

She enrolled in an amateur language school, and while she spent most of her few months there with US expats, Rudolph said the experience in China helped her realize nothing is impossible. And that was the beginning of her career in film.

On WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform, an article written by a mother who was amazed by her daughter's reaction to the waitress who dropped sauce on her bag was widely reposted recently.

After telling the waitress not to worry, the daughter told her mother when she was studying in the UK, she worked in a restaurant as a waitress to help pay for school. She made similar mistakes, but the people affected gave her nothing but smiles.

Of course, studying abroad can be costly. The US students studying at the high school where Obama visited, have to pay $50,000 annual tuition. And the average annual cost of a Chinese student studying in the US is $32,000, according to estimates by Chinese education agencies. Even with financial assistance, not everyone can get the opportunities and the means to go abroad.

But abroad or domestic, it is always true that one can learn more from real life than in an ivory tower. So for domestic students, internships can be vital.

I can attest to it personally. I grew up in China, and I had to choose whether I'd like to focus on studying natural sciences or social sciences when I was in the second year of high school.

Then I had to choose whether I'd like to target colleges that offer foreign language studies before I took the national college entrance examinations.

And I had to choose colleges before I had the chance to visit them and pick the subjects I would like to study before I knew what they were about. I had to do this right after exams, before I even got the final results.

With little interaction with the world outside of campus, I made these life choices blindly until the first semester of my last year in college when we were required to spend the entire semester doing an internship.

I worked in a newspaper in Beijing as a reporter, fell in love with the profession, and have been sticking to it ever since. That was the first decision I consciously made for myself, a decision I am still happy about.

But a recent report by renren.com, a social media site that provides a Linkedin-type platform for college students, shows that I was indeed very lucky.

The report found 60 percent of college students who graduated in 2013 had not taken any internships before graduation. And for those who had, the majority spent less than two months in the post.

Here, US students are far ahead. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 63 percent of 2012 college graduates had completed at least one internship.

It may not be realistic to broadly replicate the programs that mandate a year abroad. But it may be practical for Chinese colleges to replicate the program at my alma mater and mandate at least a semester of internship.

You may not get paid, but finding that you love a particular kind of work is worth a lot.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com