College Will Expect Time Abroad

Sheila R. Adams ’05 was on the fast track at the Undergraduate Council.

As vice-chair of the Student Affairs Committee—the group the last two council presidents have chaired—she was expected by many colleagues to run for vice president in the fall.

But when Adams chose to spend the spring semester studying in Brazil, it put a dent in her plans for leadership on the council and the Black Students Association, where she was also active.

If Harvard’s deans have their way, a thousand more students will face the same dilemma as Adams. The recently released curricular review recommendations plan for 25 percent of students—or about 200 students a semester—to study abroad during the term, up from the 11 percent who currently leave for a semester.

And the remaining students will be asked to head overseas during the summer for research or courses under an “expectation” of international experience that will be included in the curriculum for all non-international undergraduates, and will be noted on students’ transcripts.

Adams’ experience was typical. She calls her time in Rio de Janeiro extremely rewarding, particularly because she could debate world affairs with other international students. But like other students who have taken courses abroad, Adams, a sociology concentrator, says that her classes abroad were much less challenging than at Harvard.

If a hundred more students a semester study abroad, administrators say they will find programs that meet Harvard’s high academic standards.

But the changes to campus social and residential life that the absence of these students will bring could be more significant and harder than expected for the remaining undergraduates to handle. At a College with 305 student groups, making room for the many students who take a semester abroad, like Adams, means organizations will have to revise their leadership timetables. Houses will have to work to reintegrate returning students into House life, while their absence could mean accommodating more transfer and visiting students to fill up empty rooms.

Jane Edwards, the director of the two-year-old Office of International Programs (OIP), is charged with figuring out how to send this greater mass of students away, and how to reintegrate them once they return.

She says that she expects extracurriculars and Houses will adapt to the increase, and that she hopes students will not see the new push for study abroad as just another added requirement.

As of now, the curricular review results propose an “expectation”—not a requirement—of overseas study or work, meaning that students could just choose to ignore the suggestion. Only 6.4 percent of students polled by The Crimson in December listed study abroad as the most pressing issue for the review to address.

If undergraduates don’t respond to the push, Edwards suggests that Harvard’s goal of preparing its student body for future success might be compromised.

“Given the shape of the world, [an undergraduate experience] needs to include assistance with developing global competence,” she says.

NEW HORIZONS, NEW MODELS

Edwards’ biggest initial challenge may be overcoming student inertia, and she hopes to use the office to marshal Harvard’s alumni and internationally oriented faculty and departments to make studying, interning and working abroad easier.

Students who are reluctant to study abroad cite the limited time to take advantage of academic opportunities at Harvard.

“I wanted to take full advantage of the four years that I have at Harvard, and I thought that sacrificing a semester would be something I’d regret down the line,” says Joseph D. McGeehin ’06, who had considered studying history at University College London for part of his junior year.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who says that his “personal aspiration is that every Harvard college student have some sort of significant experience abroad,” says that Harvard would eventually offer a “variety of models” of time abroad to eliminate concerns like missing out on classes in Cambridge.

“I don’t have a quota for those that should be formal term-time study abroad” as opposed to summer, Kirby says.

For now, the available models are relatively slim.

The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies maintains an office in Santiago, Chile that supports Harvard students in the area, helping them find internships and host families and coordinating a two-week orientation.

But Harvard has nothing like Georgetown University’s program—where 52 percent of students study abroad, many in school-sponsored programs in places like Italy and Turkey.

Edwards says she hopes to establish other regional centers on the Santiago model, perhaps in South Asia, Africa, Greece, the United Kingdom or Mexico, the earliest of which could open during the 2005-2006 academic year—assuming donations to start these programs come in.

“I am thinking of a modified version of a Santiago center...I think of it as the embassy model,” Edwards says.

NAVIGATING THE INTERNATIONAL WATERS

Kirby says that current students who studied abroad have had to overcome an institutional “criminalizing” of spending time away from Harvard—in the past, it was difficult for them to get credit here, and the rules for the types of courses taken overseas were highly regimented.

Those who chose to navigate the difficult procedures, though, generally rave about their time abroad.

They say that they had easier times within the classroom, but found their experiences with foreign cultures to be both challenging and rewarding.

“When you go abroad, you get a new appreciation for what you have here. I felt like maybe I wasn’t getting as much out of my experience here as I could...and I came back much more excited,” says Elizabeth G. Anderson ’04, who spent a semester studying English, Australian culture and film at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

For Chioma J. Duru ’04, studying abroad in Ghana changed her perspective on Harvard in a slightly less positive way—although she says she recommends study abroad for everyone.

“When you go abroad to a country where people your age yearn to receive tertiary education but cannot afford the school fees, where the idea of continuous flowing electricity and water are not always a given...complaints about upcoming problem sets, 30-page papers and lack of a campus social life seem utterly ridiculous,” Duru writes in an e-mail.

History concentrator Flora M. Lindsay-Herrera ’05, who took history, psychology, sociology and literature classes in Santiago, says that she was better able to understand the history of Latin America by learning about the ways Chileans think and act.

“There are so many ways of approaching the world that you can’t learn at Harvard,” she says.

But almost universally, students who studied abroad say they had much lighter workloads and easier material in those classes in comparison to their Harvard experience.

Duru, whose courseload consisted mainly of a lecture series about Ghana, calls the classes “definitely easier.”

Language differences presented a challenge for Sara N. Lewis ’04 in Rio de Janeiro. But Lewis writes in an e-mail that she found that her classes on Brazilian Contemporary Economy, Portuguese, Brazilian History and Race Relations and Ethnic Identity in Brazil had a lighter workload than her Harvard classes.

Rather than prioritizing analysis and assuming comprehension, often the Harvard model, Katharine E. Jackson ’04 says that her classes in Australia “focused on learning the information, as opposed to really exploring it, the way we do here.”

Jackson took mostly large lecture courses on psychology, women’s studies and Australian culture.

Lindsay-Herrera says that she had far more free time in Chile than she did here, despite a four-course workload. Unlike at Harvard, her professors did not give near-constant feedback on her performance.

But whether a less challenging academic environment should be a deterrent to study abroad is an open question.

Edwards says she thinks students should not let the more traditional academic pressures prevent them from taking the time to experience another culture.

“Pretty much every place you go, it’s going to be somewhat less intense than it is here,” she says . “I want it to be challenging and rewarding, but I want it to...give them cultural experience as well.”

Nevertheless she says one of her priorities in evaluating potential programs will be their academic rigor.

And Steve Reifenberg, the regional program director of the center in Santiago, says that experiences abroad are challenging in ways that classes at Harvard can never be.

“If you ask the question a different way: was the overall international experience challenging?...I think you will get incredibly passionate and compelling answers about the value of studying in a different system, a different language, with students and professors with different assumptions, ” Reifenberg writes in an e-mail.

CHANGES AT HOME

Edwards and the Office of International Programs—as well as departments that choose whether to grant course credit—have some control over the academic rigor of programs abroad.

But administrators cannot change Harvard’s highly competitive extracurricular atmosphere, or prevent students who study abroad from feeling left out of their clubs once they return. For study abroad to take hold at Harvard, students and administrators say, the leadership timelines of extracurricular groups will have to change.

In both large and small student organizations, students say that spending time away prevented them from achieving leadership roles.

Lewis had planned to run for a board position in Fuerza Latina, but says her trip to Brazil in fall 2002 made that impossible.

“It did throw me out of the loop for several organizations I was in,” writes Lewis, who had also been involved in tutoring and helped found a salsa group.

Leaders of student organizations say that while their members can easily become involved again when returning from abroad, leadership positions are a different story.

“I knew running for president as a sophomore that I could never do study abroad and I think that is how it will always be,” Ethan L. Gray, president emeritus of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO), writes in an e-mail.

The presidency of HRO is a series of positions lasting nearly three years.

It “is one of the longest time commitments that I have heard of in terms of student group leadership positions, and because of that, study abroad is not a realistic option,” Gray writes.

Stephanie R. Hurder ’06, the current HRO president, was accepted to a program in New Zealand and was all set to go when she decided to run for president two days before the HRO election.

She still hopes to go abroad after graduation.

For some student athletes, giving up extracurricular activities is also a hard sell.

McGeehin, a midfielder on the lacrosse team, says one reason he didn’t head to London for a semester was the thought of losing a season of game eligibility.

But Anderson was able to play water polo in Australia and says she “didn’t have any trouble getting back into it.” She co-captained the team this spring.

Edwards, the OIP director, says she hopes that increased numbers of students studying abroad will resolve the disconnect with extracurricular leadership at home by forcing groups to be more accommodating.

“It’s a critical mass thing. If a very small number of students study abroad, then no one’s going to make any changes,” she says.

At Georgetown, extracurricular involvement does not make students reluctant to study abroad because international experience is a part of the school’s culture, says Shannon A. Donoghue, the resource center coordinator for Georgetown’s Division of Overseas Studies.

“The notion of overseas study is extremely well-institutionalized here. A very substantial amount of the student population has been going abroad for generations,” Donoghue says.

Kirby points out that even with larger study abroad programs, “other schools do not appear to lack for exciting extracurricular opportunities.”

But Harvard may nevertheless be exceptional on the student group front. Administrators this summer are convening a task force to consider ways of limiting the number of student groups on campus, citing an overabundance of organizations and a consequent lack of resources and space.

FITTING BACK IN

Jackson says that based on her experiences in Australia, students who spend time abroad may return with clearer extracurricular priorities—and may be less likely to see their student organizations as part of a rat race.

“I think you would see fewer students overcommitting themselves, because when you take time away from school, you see what the important activities are, and the importance of pacing yourself,” she says.

Ashley A.P. Horan ’05, who attended a program in Cameroon, Central Africa and held leadership positions in On Thin Ice and Harvard Students for Choice after her return, agrees that students who study abroad would choose their extracurriculars more wisely and would better avoid burning out from overcommitting themselves.

“People would just be smarter....It’s so important for people to travel and to learn about environments that aren’t Harvard,” she says. “I think people would have more energy to dedicate to things that matter on a larger scale, both to the university and to the larger world.”

House Masters say that since study abroad usually alters students’ outlook, reintegration into House life after a semester away can present challenges.

“They are always changed by study abroad, but in good ways, in interesting and mind-enhancing ways. Usually, when they come back, things are a little bit different for a while,” Adams House Master Sean Palfrey says.

“It’s difficult if they can’t maintain their own housing, rooming group, roommate situations, and that’s something the College and the Houses will have to pay a great deal of attention to,” Palfrey says. “That is something that we have to build into the housing as well as we can, though it’s not going to be easy if we have a large number of people studying back and forth.”

Palfrey says he thinks returning students will have little trouble as long as they can rejoin old rooming groups. And he says any changes to House life will happen gradually, and thus not necessarily noticeably.

But Cabot House Master Jay M. Harris says he thought that greater numbers of students studying abroad may force Houses to open their doors to more transfer and visiting students in order to meet expenses—which will “change the dynamic quite a bit.”

Duru says that when she returned from Ghana in fall 2003, she at first “felt lost” and uninterested in Harvard’s extracurricular and social life.

“Somehow after my experiences abroad, it wasn’t as important to me as before and I became just a bit marginalized from the Harvard community at large,” she writes, adding that she has since become more involved again.

Palfrey, whose children all studied abroad during their college years, says that a sense of disorientation is probably inevitable after students spend a semester in a foreign culture.

“You do adjust your priorities to some degree,” he says. So long as Harvard’s study abroad priority moves slowly, Palfrey says, the College is likely to be able to make adjustments as well.

Duru sums up the College’s new attitude toward study abroad, saying, “You have four years at Harvard. Why spend them all in Harvard Square?”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.