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During their careers here, almost 62 percent of Dartmouth undergraduates do some form of study abroad. That's the highest percentage in the Ivy League, and it is significantly higher than the national average of 2 percent, according to a recent report by the Institute for International Education.
Why the interest? Does a term or more in another country really enhance a student's education and development as a person or as a global citizen?
For music major Stella Lee '05, spending a term in London last spring provided a turning point in her life. It gave her the chance to decide whether to dedicate herself to a career as a professional pianist or to keep working toward medical school. For engineering sciences major Brian Ferguson '04, two terms in Germany opened his eyes to another way of seeing the world.
"I was there right when the [U.S. invasion of Iraq] broke out," says Ferguson. "I was expecting a very standoffish attitude—[the Germans] not wanting much to do with me, but it wasn't that way at all. I was impressed with the entire culture. I can see myself going back there."
For history major Elisheva Hirshman-Green '04, studying art history in Florence one term led to a term in Cape Town studying South African art, history, and literature, which evolved into a senior history honors project on a now-vanished Jewish community in Cape Town.
"I had traveled before, but I had never really lived in [another] country," Hirshman-Green says. "I never had the experience of being part of a community where the local grocer knows who you are."
"The whole foreign studies program at Dartmouth is so unique," says Lee. "I talk to my friends who go to comparable schools, and they don't have the same type of resource."
A Changing Experience
Dartmouth's off-campus programs include Dartmouth Language Study Abroad (LSA, and the more advanced LSA+), Dartmouth Foreign Study Programs (FSP), and Dartmouth exchange programs with schools abroad. Students also can transfer up to four credits earned at another college's program.
"Dartmouth is unlike most other schools in that all of our off-campus courses are Dartmouth courses," explains John Tansey, off-campus programs administrator. For the LSA and FSP, "Dartmouth faculty always lead the program and teach at least one course." Other courses are largely taught by local university professors.
Dartmouth students can study Portuguese in Brazil, Spanish in Uruguay, art history in Italy, theater or music in England, biology in Jamaica and Costa Rica, geography in the Czech Republic, Arabic culture in Morocco, or Russian in Russia—and that's just a small sample.
"A significant number of students will do a second program," says Tansey. "A few will do a third."
Almost all LSA students live with host families, and virtually all the study-abroad opportunities involve immersion in the whole culture, "experiencing as much of the locality as possible," says Tansey.
"The experience can be transforming in a lot of ways," observes Lenore Grenoble, professor of Russian and linguistics and cognitive sciences and associate dean of faculty for the humanities. "Some of our students have traveled a lot before they go into a program, but some have never traveled before."
In a day when English skills are spreading and global communications link people across the planet, some people may assume world culture has been homogenized and that there's not much to learn abroad. But Grenoble notes that with all today's cross-cultural conflicts, "nothing could be further from the truth.
"It's more important than ever to experience a different community, to become part of that community," she says. "You can't understand the world all at once. But sometimes just understanding how the people of one culture think can bring a lot of self-awareness."
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"It Opened My Eyes"
"That's the way to learn—just dump yourself in," says Ferguson. After an LSA in Berlin in 2002, he enrolled in an exchange program linking Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering with the University of the Armed Forces in Hamburg. There to study mechanical engineering with a full-time internship at a German manufacturing company, Ferguson found himself living in a barracks with German soldiers.
At first he was wary. But he found the young Germans open-minded and eager to know him as a person, not to judge him as a symbol of American policy.
"It really opened my eyes," he says.
On FSPs in Florence and then in Cape Town, New York City native Hirshman-Green learned to slow down, take time with people, and let her learning experiences settle in deeply.
"Both socially and academically, you get the chance to have long talks about the material with other people who are studying the same things. As an academic experience, it was very fulfilling," she says. And, as an art history major studying works on site, she found "turning a slide into reality is an amazing thing. You can't substitute for the emotion of stuff like that."
"I think the FSP is especially important to music majors, because it gives you the chance to immerse yourself in that one thing," says Lee, who decided in London to become a piano-playing physician after all. She credits a professor of piano from London's Royal College of Music with helping her learn where to place music in her life. "College professors realize we're all trying to discover ourselves," she says. "He gave me the guidance I needed."
Back on campus, Lee adds, study-abroad experiences are shared, and that's part of the learning. "It's not even just your own experience," she says. "You talk about it with your friends, and they have their own experiences."
Lee dreams of going back to London some day. Like so many of her peers, she is a step closer to becoming a global citizen for having lived and learned someplace different through Dartmouth's study abroad programs.
By Doug Wilhelm
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