Over There
By Sue Dickman '89
In the middle of May 2000, 10 years after my own first trip to India, I found myself sitting under a tree on the grounds of an old British hunting lodge near the hill station of Mussoorie, in northern India, surrounded by a motley group of American college students. They were waiting—not always patiently—for their turns to tell us all what they had learned. As the co-director of a study-abroad program based in Jaipur, I had first met these students at the Delhi airport more than three months earlier, when they had been awkward, eager and afraid. Now that the program was nearly over, their confidence was astonishing. In addition to classes and homestays, they had done independent study: Some had volunteered at social-service organizations in Delhi or Jaipur, some had studied Indian music or traditional crafts, several had done creative writing projects, one had studied the philosophy of the religious teacher J. Krishnamurthi.
The final presentation was by a young woman who had lived in the holy city of Benares, right beside the Ganges River, where scores of people came each day to bathe and to pray and, often, to die. The project she handed in was both thoughtful and lovely: an essay and sketches, a series of photos, showing the role of circumambulation in Hindu spirituality and in people’s individual spiritual lives. The impact on her went well beyond her project, though. When she spoke about what she had seen in Benares, her voice broke. She had learned not just about Hindu worship but something about herself she had not known earlier, though she couldn’t articulate it exactly. “I was surrounded by death,” she finally told us, “and that changes the way you look at things.”
I had no doubt that that student—as well as some of the others—would be a different person as a result of her experience. Her semester in India had taught her many concrete things, things she could be tested on, things she could write about. But the more significant lessons she and the others had learned could not be contained within the confines of a spiral notebook. She could not be the same afterward, nor would she want to be.
Students choose to go abroad for many reasons. Amherst students sometimes go to get away from the small and occasionally claustrophobic campus community. In other cases, they go toward something, attracted by another place. But whatever their intentions and whatever the destination, all of them, like the student in Benares, are transformed to one degree or another.
Dr. Mark Miller ’83 is a case in point. Miller modestly calls what he does “applied anthropology,” but his work does not have modest goals. As director of the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies at the Fogarty International Center, part of the National Institutes of Health, Miller builds teams of investigators from very different disciplines to solve international health problems, especially in the developing world. Miller’s career—through Yale Medical School, the Centers for Disease Control, the United Nations and now the NIH—has always been interdisciplinary. He credits this to the semester he spent in Kenya during his junior year at Amherst, an experience he calls “life-transforming…not only opening my eyes to other worlds but providing the foundation of much of the interdisciplinary work in which I am currently engaged.”
Miller attended the St. Lawrence University program in Kenya because he wanted to be immersed in an entirely different culture where language would not be a problem. “Amherst is a wonderful place to stay for four years,” he said recently, “but it’s also insular, and I wanted a small slice of the real world, as both a contrast and supplement to the educational experience there.”
His program involved several months of classes in Nairobi—including African literature, Swahili and a comparative view of sociopolitical systems in East Africa—along with two weeks of field experience (during which he lived with the Samburu people) and a one-week rural homestay near Lake Victoria. For the program’s required month-long internship, Miller chose to work with Richard Leakey at the Kenya National Museum. Miller describes St. Lawrence’s program as “very rich,” in its combination of academic classes and field experience (the field experience, he says, was still academic, though “less didactic”). After the program ended, Miller stayed on to pursue a second internship in wildlife-behavior studies with the United Nations Environment Program. Not only did his five months in Kenya provide him with material for the senior thesis he wrote for Deborah Gewertz, the G. Henry Whitcomb 1874 Professor of Anthropology, but it also whetted his appetite for travel. He has sought out opportunities to work overseas in the years since.
Now, more than 20 years after his semester studying abroad, Mark Miller can say without exaggeration that his time in Kenya changed his life. He already knew that he “hated hospitals” and wasn’t interested in clinical practice, but this experience of the complex problems of healthcare in a developing country showed him an area of medicine in which he might flourish. Miller’s belief in the benefits of international exposure is so firm that he is now involved—with fellow Amherst graduate Pierce Gardner ’57—in a new NIH program designed to send medical students to the developing world, so they, too, might consider careers in public health. Miller credits the impetus for his life’s work to the crucial combination of seven semesters of a strong liberal arts education—and a key semester away from it.
Roughly 40 percent of Amherst students choose to study abroad, the vast majority for a semester during their junior year. The programs available to them vary considerably in their balance of academic and experiential components. For example, Alyson Thibodeau ’04, a anthropology/ geology double major and an archeology buff since childhood, spent a semester on an archeological dig in Belize. She went specifically for the on-site excavation the program offered. Her days were spent mainly excavating Mayan ruins, work supplemented with lectures by faculty members and visiting archeologists. Initially she found it difficult to learn about Mayan culture and archeology through the lectures, but partway through the program, it all began to make sense; the lectures, informal conversations with researchers and the fieldwork in which she was participating informed each other in such a way that she gained a much greater understanding than if the pieces had occurred separately.
Alexandra Bloom ’04, who spent six months in Shanghai, chose to study abroad because she wanted to experience another culture and another language. Andrew Gillette ’04, a math major who spent a semester in Budapest, wanted to go abroad without sacrificing the academic excellence he had experienced at Amherst. He rejected the glossy program advertisements that seemed to offer fun in the sun, choosing instead the thin, gray, photo-free pamphlet that described his Hungarian program.
In approving each program, the college must weigh these various experiential and academic elements, a task made harder by the fact that one can complement the other, often in very beneficial ways.
Amherst President Anthony W. Marx is a strong proponent of international experience, having gone to South Africa a few years after his college graduation to work with the country’s leading educational organization. Later, as a graduate student, he spent years in South Africa doing fieldwork for his Ph.D. He says he initially went to South Africa because he decided “that it was time for me to see for myself whether it was quite as straightforward a story as I had led myself to believe. Of course, going there, living there and experiencing it proved that it was not quite as simple as I thought.” But while he appreciates the value of experiencing another place, he is also mindful of the need for academic rigor in overseas programs. “I do think there is a distinction,” he says, “that academic credit should be for academic work, but academic work can be informed by, engaged by, enriched by experiences….And [experiential learning] is relevant to the curriculum, because students often find that their experiences are what get them excited about their studying.”
Alyson Thibodeau is a fine example of this. Her archeology semester in Belize was followed by a summer at a geology field camp in Montana. Prior to her time abroad, Thibodeau says she was a “typical” college student who tried to be organized but didn’t always succeed. She discovered, with some surprise, that she functioned better abroad than she had at Amherst. Of her first semester back at Amherst, she says simply, “I’m a much better student.” While archeology was Thibodeau’s primary interest, she also saw going to a developing country as an opportunity to prove herself—to herself—and to differentiate herself from others at Amherst. Deborah Gewertz, her thesis advisor, points out that many young women use time abroad, especially in a non-European country, as a way to test their independence. Nationally, two-thirds of students going abroad are women.
In our increasingly global world, study abroad has the potential for an impact beyond the merely personal or academic. A panel recently convened by the Association of International Educators said that America’s insularity was “a national liability.” “We are unnecessarily putting ourselves at risk,” the panel concluded, “because of our stubborn monolingualism and ignorance of the world.” Ronald Rosbottom, the Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of French and European Studies, concurs. “American horizons are so narrow,” he says. “Anything to broaden the horizons should be encouraged.”
In the past few years, Amherst students have studied in Russia, China, Japan, Costa Rica, Chile, Zimbabwe, South Africa, India, Nepal and Senegal. Still, each year 70 percent—a slightly higher rate than at Amherst’s peer institutions—choose study in the more familiar environment of Europe. Part of the reason so many students go to countries like Italy, Spain and Britain is that so many programs are offered there (144 out of Amherst’s 241 approved programs are in Europe; only seven are in Africa). A student who wants to go elsewhere, especially to a developing country, may have to work harder, petitioning to get the program accepted. In Professor of English Barry O’Connell’s view, “One thing Amherst does badly is the sustained and sensible encouragement of students going to difficult places.”
One important measure of the effectiveness of study abroad is the length of time that a student spends in the country. Most students choose to go abroad for a semester, rather than a full year, a situation that the college’s study-abroad advisor, William Hoffa, feels offers less than the full benefit. “We need to fight harder,” he says, “to make students understand what we know to be the case: that a [year-long] program has three times the impact of a semester, even though it’s only twice as long.” Hoffa also notes that students who have spent a year abroad seldom say that was too long, while about half of the students who spent a semester abroad say that their visits were too short.
The “difficult places” Barry O’Connell mentions and the longer programs Hoffa advocates often provide students with the most intense experiences and most lasting impact. Alexandra Bloom, the student who spent six months in China, interned for several months at an English-language daily newspaper in Shanghai and says she came in direct contact with Chinese government censorship. After handing in several of her articles, she was told that the topics she’d chosen were too sensitive for publication. (One of those topics was the Nanking Massacre, which is now the subject of a project for her political science major.) Beryl Dudley ’04, a native of the Virgin Islands, was taken for “colored” (mixed race) and spoken to in Afrikaans while she was in South Africa. Alissa King ’04 lived with a polygamous family in Senegal and now is writing a thesis on polygamy that is informed by her having heard directly the views of feminist groups and fundamentalists, and experienced firsthand Senegal’s changing family norms and marriage patterns. And King’s interest in Senegal is now more than academic: She interned last summer at African Relief Services in Harlem, where she worked with West African immigrants; she continues to work on her language skills with a Wolof-speaking professor at Mount Holyoke; and she now plans to pursue a career in international development, ideally in Francophone West Africa.
“Part of what happens when you have other experiences elsewhere,” says President Marx, “is that you begin to see that your simplifying characterizations don’t work. You learn about complications and try to understand them in another country, which is an amazing learning experience by itself, and [those experiences] also end up doubling back and encouraging you to rethink your assumptions about your own society.”
For all its benefits, study abroad is not a perfect system. Some faculty members say that study abroad takes away from an already truncated higher education experience. Still others are concerned about the programs being academically weak or run by people who only want to make a profit. Some worry that students may see study abroad as a kind of vacation for credit, and they point out that leaving for a semester is difficult for students with certain majors (especially in the sciences, where many courses must be taken in sequence). Finally, some faculty note that travel in certain areas of the world can be unsafe.
Study-abroad advisor Bill Hoffa says that while programs give students structure, that structure can sometimes prevent students from having a genuine experience of living abroad. He uses the term “third-culture complex” to describe what can happen when students enter what amounts to a cultural bubble, a finite universe within the foreign culture. The local people who enter the bubble are a subgroup, not necessarily representative of the culture as a whole, and often self-selected. These people can be extremely helpful to students, but it becomes a problem if students don’t recognize that the bubble even exists.
This potential isolation from the culture is part of the reason that Barry O’Connell says he has not always been a supporter of study abroad—he calls it “too short and too sheltered”— advocating instead that students take time off to travel independently. One of O’Connell’s former students, Michael de Beer ’96, shows what is possible outside of a study-abroad program for students willing to accept the logistical and financial drawbacks of taking time off. De Beer was prepared to go to South Africa on a study-abroad program sponsored by the University of Massachusetts when he learned that the program had been cancelled. (This was in 1994, the first year of democratic elections in South Africa.) De Beer decided to make the trip on his own. He had developed an interest in education reform while taking English 6, and he wanted to investigate this further in South Africa.
As part of his preparation, de Beer contacted South African schools for interviews, and he eventually found work as a volunteer teacher. When he wasn’t teaching, he informally attended the University of Witwatersrand, where he learned about the Witwatersrand Rural Facility, a research and community-service center helping people in rural Bushbuckridge manage their resources, economy and education. Through one of the professors at the university, de Beer was able to get an internship on a local education reform project. De Beer believes that if he had gone on the original UMass program, he might have made closer friends and might even have had more fun. “But,” he says, “at Bushbuckridge I got to be part of the education-reform program and learned that I had capabilities that I did not know I had. I have the ‘learning bug.’ Maybe I’ve always had it, but traveling on my own in South Africa really amped it up.”
After returning to Amherst, de Beer wrote a thesis on South African education reform for an interdisciplinary major called Education: State and Society. Now a community organizer in Toledo, Ohio, de Beer says that his year in South Africa was crucial: “My time in South Africa had a profound effect on me; it set me on some paths that I continue to walk today. I am very grateful for my time there, and for starting on these paths.”
What de Beer shares with most students who study abroad in more structured ways is that he learned not only about the culture in which he was immersed, but also about himself. Not all students rearrange their lives around their experiences abroad as Mark Miller did, or as Alissa King might, but most cannot help but look at the world—and themselves—differently after their time away. At the end of the spring 2000 semester, my student who’d been in Benares wrote this: “All I know is that this does not feel like an end, but some sort of beginning with a past chained onto the tail.”