College Scholars around the world
In the spring of 2014 Alana Stein studied in Málaga, Spain as a part of her program in Food Security with Sociopolitical and Chemical Emphases. While there, she had the unique opportunity to take courses with local students that covered topics such as social work, immigration, quality of life, urban environment, and human development. Her experience was unique due to the timing of the trip because she was able to see how citizens reacted to these issues during a time of economic crisis. As she described her experience, “Each of these issues was quite prevalent in our lives as we lived in a country with an unemployment rate of 24%. The rate was even more exacerbated in the south of Spain where I was studying. Therefore, I was able to observe how a developed country worked to improve financial problems and provide support for its citizens. Since Spain has similar infrastructure to the United States, their situation is more akin to hunger issues in the United States than those in many developing countries. My experience abroad allowed me to learn a different perspective of combating social issues than I have experienced in an American classroom while also learning a second language.”
Summer Awad wrote about her summer 2014 experience. “My senior project is to write a play about the lives of Palestinians under occupation. With the help of the Summer Undergraduate Research Internship funding, I spent the month of June in Amman, Jordan, conducting interviews with people who identify as Palestinian, including refugees living in two of the thirteen camps there. All in all, I conducted and translated 20 interviews and had many more informal discussions on the topic of Palestine. I improved my Arabic, particularly my Palestinian dialect, tremendously, and I completed a close reading of the most respected textbook on the topic.”
Andrew Curtis spent the summer in Europe — This summer, I had the opportunity to study video editing and Italian Cinema in Rome through a third-party program, International Studies Abroad (ISA). I’d like to argue that my experience abroad was one of the greatest and most influential experiences of my life. I had classes everyday at AUR, which were very interesting, as they were very related to my field. After classes, my friends and I would take the bus back to our apartments. Each night, we would go to one another’s apartment to have dinner, which we took turns fixing. My specialty was hamburgers with barbecue, homemade French fries, and southern sweet tea (a favorite among my friends). Other nights, we would take Tram 8 to the other side of the Tiber River to go to Campo de Fiori, a popular spot for young travelers, with many restaurants and bars. We would stay out late into the night and then take one of the night buses back to our apartment. During that month, we took weekend trips to Capri (a gorgeous island off the Amalfi Coast, which had the clearest water I’ve ever seen), Sorrento & Naples, the ruins of Pompeii, Florence, and Tuscany (where we had a fantastic wine tasting). One of my roommates and I also took a last-minute weekend trip to Geneva, Switzerland, which was so gorgeous. After the program, I visited Venice, Thessaloniki and Athens, London, Barcelona and Madrid. My experiences abroad have struck me with wanderlust -a strong desire to wander and travel the globe.