I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: learning outside of the lecture hall box is good for you. It opens you up and forces you to adjust your thinking about the world: it’s not all black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, fair. And it’s always eye-opening for a college-age whipper-snapper to realize that their little slice of reality is absolutely not everyone else’s. Plus, a semester abroad is a superb excuse for your parents to support travel and road trips.

I’ve done this twice, and I can whole-heartedly recommend a term “studying abroad.” This sometimes doesn’t even have to involve leaving the U.S. I stayed in the States for the road trip I took to the Deep South (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana). I was a senior at Evergreen College, and designed my own curriculum for the quarter. So, you know, it clearly had to include a road trip to the opposite of my native California (and if the South isn’t the opposite of California, I don’t know what is) as well as photography, reading Southern literature, and writing about it all. And back when I was a sophomore at Cal State Fresno, I went on the South Pacific Semester and spent 4 months in New Zealand and Australia with 3 professors and 22 other students. It was a big New Zealand road trip with some Great Barrier Reef thrown in for good measure. A geology lecture is better when you’re standing on a volcano and biology is just a lot damn shinier when you’re snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef.

The Christian Science Monitor had an article about Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington having a Semester in the West that sounds incredible. Can you imagine a 100-day road trip through the American West for credit? Sometimes I’m cranky that I’m done with school (for the time being).

“For their three-month odyssey, the students earn a full semester of credits: four each in politics, environmental studies, biology, and writing & rhetoric. They write several papers during the trip, and one final piece – a ‘capstone epiphany’ – is delivered with slides to a campus-wide audience.

More important than what they learned about the American West, however, may be what they learned about themselves. By being thrust into some of the most contentious cultural and environmental issues this side of the Mississippi, the students ended up challenging – even overturning – some of their most cherished notions about the politics of the region.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College | School | Life