A number of specific programs, for which there are materials in the Resource Room, are recommended for Swarthmore students. These programs occur in all parts of the world, and in most of the countries in which it is possible to do foreign study. It is expected that Swarthmore students who study abroad will attend these programs, and you should expect and intend to figure out ways to use programs on the recommended list for your foreign study interests. Much experience teaches that the advising process can be very helpful with this: that is, Steve Piker in conversation with you will be able to help you see likely prospects that you may not have been able to figure out on your own. The Office for Foreign Study, however, intends to be no less flexible than other academic parts of the College in helping to develop individualized responses to academically valid student interests. If you and/or we find that your valid interests cannot be well responded by programs on our recommended list, we will be willing to undertake further exploration with you. Discuss your interests, which may change as your exploration proceeds, with Steve Piker. He will do his best to help you find the good foreign study program(s) for them.
A bit of background information: There are more than three thousand foreign study programs and/or other study abroad opportunities out there. The vast majority of them range in quality from so-so to unspeakably awful, and I suspect that a few of them may be criminal. A lot of effort – on the part of this office, Swarthmore faculty colleagues, and colleagues at other institutions both domestic and abroad – has gone into identifying programs which are good for Swarthmore. Our recommended list comprises the distillation of this effort.
In selecting your program, you may wonder: what are the characteristics of programs attended by Swarthmore students? The full answer to this would require description of each program attended by our students. Well short of this, perhaps the following may be of some use to you.
First, the programs that Swarthmore students have attended over the past few years vary in many ways. Obviously and importantly, there is the country and its culture: attending a university in Scotland is just going to be very different from attending a university in Sri Lanka, regardless of what you study. As well, programs vary greatly as regards, e.g., academic content and emphases, distinctive subject matter strengths, formats of instruction, professional profiles of teaching (and other) staff, nature of assignments, extent and importance of language learning, how - and how fully - cultural immersion is fostered, and the ways in which (and extent to which) the non-academic parts of students' lives are configured.
Second, and notwithstanding this great diversity, there is one crosscutting dimension of variability, which many Swarthmore students have found to be important in selecting programs, and it is this:
Some good programs are university based and classroom focused (e.g., Swarthmore's Grenoble Program, almost all programs attended by our students in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand). For these, students attend a university, go to classes (and labs if science courses are involved), use the library, and write papers and exams. Always, the academic culture is different from that of Swarthmore. Typically, such programs make a lot of cultural immersion easy and sometimes (e.g., Grenoble, Hamilton in Madrid, ISLE) inescapable. Most university-based programs attended by our students are in continental Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Some are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Other good programs are field work oriented. The hallmark of these programs is that the locally available culture is a main academic resource for the program; and the point of many assignments is to learn about this culture - about local life, about natives experiencing and enacting naturalistic, everyday situations - through, e.g., field work projects and internships, and to do appropriate writing based on this. In these programs, participating in the local culture is an important means to learning about it. Such programs typically have a classroom component, but it is small scale, informal, and you don't go to a university to get it. Strong emphasis is usually placed upon language learning, and upon becoming able as quickly as possible to live one's life and do field work in the language of the host culture. With such programs, students typically live all or a large part of the semester with host families (where English usually is not spoken), and often become functional speakers of a language (e.g., Setswana, Nepali, Italian, Turkish) to which they are newly introduced by the program. Almost all such programs attended by our students are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Some specification: a) This is not an all or none distinction. There are some hybrids out there. b) One type is not more academic than the other. They are differently academic - although the field work type of academics is hard to come by at Swarthmore. c) Both types are credit worthy at Swarthmore upon completion.
Third, degree of accessibility of the host culture to the visiting student. Strictly speaking, this isn't wholly or even mainly a feature of the program, but it can powerfully influence your experiences with a program. If this is important to you, don't assume that trappings of cultural similarity are a reliable indicator of cultural accessibility for you. Thus, experiences of students suggest that access to the host culture in, e.g., Botswana or Nepal or Costa Rica or Ghana or Vietnam or Mali or Bolivia is often much less difficult than it is, say, in England.
Fourth, your identity and the host culture. Again, this is not strictly speaking a feature of the program, but it may be important to you. Specifically, you may wonder about and/or be concerned about how particular features of your identity (e.g., gender, race, sexual preference, nationality) will fit with and/or be reacted to by your host culture. Especially if this concerns you, it will behoove you to find out in advance what awaits you, and to factor this into your decision making. Steve Piker and Rosa Bernard will be glad to discuss this with you, and to help you to get squared away on these issues. A procedural suggestion: wherever you are going, your program just about certainly occupies a small and specialized niche in its host country. This is what you mainly want to find out about, what to expect in the local and specialized niche of your program and its cultural environs. Thus, e.g., a gay student may learn that a possible Spanish America destination country has a lot of homophobia or a female student may learn that in a European country, or city, native men are prone to take verbal liberties with the ladies. Both could very well be correct but, probably, for you, this does not slice the loaf anywhere near finely enough, it does not predict reliably the daily parameters of your existence in country in these respects. For this, it is often helpful to be in touch directly with the program, which just about certainly is sensitive to and knowledgeable about these issues as they bear on its participants, and will be glad to discuss this with you and help you to become usefully informed. Quite possibly, the program will be able to put you in touch with students who have completed it, and who while doing so dealt with the identity or life style issues that concern you prospectively. And please also N.B.: After you have become specifically informed, if what you have learned about the situation is disturbing to you, confront this responsibly, which means, inter alia, don’t expect the local situation to change in these respects when you show up in deference to your needs and feelings. Thus, in parts of South Asia, all women must undergo ritual purification each month following their periods. This cultural usage expresses beliefs about female pollution with which most Americans disagree, and which many or most find deeply objectionable. Female American students who attend one homestay program in S. Asia must undergo this monthly purification ritual. For female students contemplating this program who are not prepared to accommodate to this cultural usage, the moral of the story is straightforward: don’t go. Top
Fifth, in the foreign study trade some programs are called (by sponsors as well as outsiders) 'island programs'. These are not programs that occur on islands. Rather, they are programs that ghettoize American students, often in Americanized environments with American teachers brought over to teach them, and do little or nothing to foster or encourage student involvement in the host culture. Mainly, this office does not recommend such programs.
Sixth, language preparation and study abroad. The relationship is not as constraining as some people imagine, because only the very good programs in Spanish America, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan require substantial language preparation; and that is because these are the only languages widely available for study in this country. For the best programs in these countries, usually two years of college level language or its equivalent is required (three semesters of language work at Swarthmore may be accepted); for a few in Latin America, a little less. Just about without exception, the best foreign study programs in the rest of the world require no language preparation, and most students attending them have had none.
Seventh, programs differ considerably in the living arrangements that they make possible or obligatory for their participants. For programs which you are seriously considering, it’s important that you become as informed as you can about this. Here are some things that you should keep in mind in this regard:
A Wherever you go, just about certainly your living arrangements will provide you with a novel experience.
B And, just about certainly, it will be your responsibility to adjust to what awaits you, and to make the most of it. Go intending to do just this.
C If you attend a university in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand, your program will do its best to provide you with integrated living arrangements. But, please remember: in these universities degree candidate students have first priority for housing; and, among visiting students, those who come in the Fall and plan to stay all year normally have housing priority over others.
D If your living arrangements require you to prepare your own meals, you will enjoy flexibility not available to those who eat on catered plans. So also will you have to shoulder the logistical responsibilities of shopping for food, cooking, and cleaning up after yourself, and - possibly - the social responsibilities of coordinating all of this with housemates. In doing all of this, you’re going to get a lot of experience in negotiating the trivia of everyday life in your host country, which will at once provide you with fine opportunities for learning about local culture and for experiencing some aggravation.
E Many very good programs make homestays, for some or all of the semester, available or obligatory, just about always for explicit educational reasons which are integral to what the programs are all about. If you are looking seriously at programs which do so, you want to think about this carefully. You will be mightily helped in this by talking with students who have completed the program, especially about their homestay experiences. Unquestionably, a homestay will provide you with special, remarkable opportunities: there likely will be unparalleled possibilities for culture and language learning: you usually will have the chance to get to know very well some or all of the members of your host family, even sometimes to bond with them; often, you will become involved in your host family’s own social world, which will provide entree for you to otherwise inaccessible sectors of your host culture; and occasionally - not usually - you will find surrogate parents or siblings. But please also remember the following: i) If you do a homestay, you are obliged to accommodate yourself to the domestic routines of your host family, many of which - pertaining to such ‘basics’ as, e.g., use of hot water, use of telephone, eating customs, having visitors, use of household space, terms of address and self reference, indoors temperature, acceptable patterns of dress at home - will be new to you. ii) As you know from your living arrangements at Swarthmore, and/or those of friends and acquaintances, when virtual strangers try to share living space, there is a luck-of-the-draw element to the interpersonal chemistry. All involved may be fine and well-intentioned people, and the interpersonal chemistry still may be better or may be worse. If in a homestay situation abroad it’s not as good as you may have hoped, still intend to do your best to adapt and make the best of it. Often, just time and your palpable effort to accommodate will produce real improvement. iii) The homestay deck has many cards in it, and a few of them are just not good. No matter how careful and conscientious your program is in selecting families for homestays, and in matching student with family, unfortunate outcomes are possible. Family discord can crop up anywhere. You won’t find a country without alcohol and drugs, and some abuse of same. One Swarthmore student in a homestay situation was sexually harassed by her host father (sensibly and responsibly, she went straight to the program staff, who placed her with another family immediately, where things worked out very well. She remained close friends with her host sister from the first family). On another program, three Swarthmore students were lodged with a family where the father was verbally and physically abusive toward his wife and daughters, although never to them (this was not untypical of gender relations in some rural sectors of this host country. The students made out of this an opportunity to study close up some of the nasty aspects of gender relations in their community, which proved educationally to be very worthwhile. But the cost was abiding a really unpleasant domestic situation). Serious problems such as this are very uncommon, but not unheard of, in homestay situations. Should, heaven forfend, you find yourself in such a situation, your first and main recourse is the program staff: go tell them about it immediately and fully.
Eight, your dietary preferences or requirements and program selection. A number of students have strong dietary preferences or even requirements, e.g., vegetarian or kosher diets. If you are one such student, it is your responsibility, for the programs you are considering, to find out what they make available by way of dietary choice. This is publicly available information, all you have to do is ask. Please remember: You are not entitled to special dietary arrangements in deference to dietary preferences or requirements you may have before you join the program. And, please also N.B., do not consider attending a home stay program unless you are prepared graciously to eat what your host family normally eats. If you have an eating disorder, please do not consider attending a home stay program. Top