As a second-semester senior, I spend a lot of my time thinking about, planning and panicking over the future. I don’t think I can predict where I’ll be in a decade, but no matter what happens, I hope I will be able to travel a lot.

Growing up, I was lucky to have parents who valued travel. Seeing and living in places with extreme manifestations of poverty made me aware and appreciative of my own privilege. This was especially apparent in India, where much of my family lives. If my grandparents hadn’t come to the United States, my life would have been very different. Interacting with other kids who shared many of my hobbies and interests despite coming from a different way of life helped me develop my view of the world, one in which people matter.

A lot of people gush about how travel has improved them, so before I get too caught up in that, I think it’s crucial to acknowledge that seeing poverty is not the same as living in poverty. Seeing poverty doesn’t automatically make you a good person, even if you’re emotionally moved by it.

In many cases, the poverty in a country results from colonial exploitation, a legacy the United States is unfortunately linked to. Tourists get to experience a better version of the places they visit than most locals. As visitors, we can pick and choose what aspects of the place we want to experience and what structural legacies we ignore. Though travelers may go without daily showers and other modern amenities, living without comforts is an immutable fact for some people. The ability to uncouple oneself from one’s surroundings is a position of power many people don’t share. While I encourage everyone to travel if they can, I hope we can all be aware of how privilege permeates travel culture and acknowledge what isn’t helping people on the ground.

There’s a difference between traveling for the sake of helping people and traveling for the sake of expanding one’s own worldview through meeting people from diverse cultural backgrounds and visiting famous landmarks. In the latter case, the traveler is using experiences to broaden his or her own horizons. The long-term results of travel will go on to influence his or her choices in life, which may help other people in the long run. I don’t think it’s bad or exploitive, so long as the traveler isn’t claiming that he or she has given back to communities when that hasn’t happened.

This summer I’ll be working in Thailand with a nonprofit foundation that helps provide refugees from Burma with quality education and vocational training. I know a lot about the organization, and I know they produce tangible positive results in the community. However, I’m worried that my time with them will benefit me more than the people I want to help. I don’t want to live a life of service for the sake of helping myself; there’s a very obvious and uncomfortable disconnect there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of voluntourism in general and how I want to relate to it. The organization I’ll be working with is reputable, but if organizations don’t do background checks or screenings on the people they’re recruiting, it’s suspicious. For example, some medical students spend some time working abroad in countries that have lax patient safety laws so that they can practice operations and surgeries they aren’t considered qualified to do on their own in the United States. Reputable nonprofits like Doctors Without Borders require primary care volunteers to be through with residency training and surgeons to have a few additional years of post-residency experience to guarantee they have enough practice to be genuinely useful.

I’m also skeptical of people who are really into volunteering abroad but don’t do any type of community service in their own hometowns or cities. Poverty in the United States manifests differently than it does in countries that have more visible slums, but over 15 percent of the population lives below the poverty threshold. Helping the poor may not be as glamorous when it happens in a homeless shelter rather than under palm trees on a tropical beach, but it’s nevertheless critical. The volunteer work that I’ll be doing this summer in Thailand will be very different than the volunteer work I’ve done in San Francisco General Hospital, but I’m happy to do both. I think seeing and trying to help alleviate poverty from different angles and in different manifestations is important for developing a view of the world where people matter.